Govt readying plan to ensure AI, data centres get enough power

Data centres and AI compute facilities—and the infrastructure to power them—are at the heart of the government’s plans towards bolstering India’s digital ecosystem.

“The internet has become a crucial part of people’s daily lives, and thus it is important that the government looks at making a particular set of infrastructure much more resilient,” said S Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), while speaking at the India Internet Governance Forum 2024 today in New Delhi.

The power requirement is immediate.

India’s data centre operational capacity will increase to 2000-2100 MW by financial year 2027, credit rating agency ICRA said in its report in October. In FY24, the capacity stood at 950MW. The data centre capacity is measured in Megawatt units of power consumed by the IT and electrical hardware used in the data centre.

For context, that's several times the power demand for a city as large as Chandigarh, which saw its power demand hit an all-time high at 438MW this summer.

“I mean financial data, data relating to power utilities, telecommunication utilities. A whole host of data which is required for people to actually live their lives on a digitised basis, which as we do today. Do we have the data centre capacity within the country to store all data that we need?” he said.

“As we adopt AI more and more, do we have enough power supply? This is again something which MeitY is looking into right now along with the Ministry of Power and Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and all related agencies to plan for this capacity to make sure that we have enough power for the data centre and for the AI compute facility that we need in this country,” MeitY secretary said.

Globally all the major tech companies are trying to figure out ways in which they can secure adequate power for the AI applications.

Sustainability

When asked whether India plans to incentivise green power to data centres and AI compute facilities, Krishnan didn’t have a direct answer.

"It's a question of availability and estimating the requirements. The power ministry and the Central Electricity Authority estimates what the power requirements are to the various sector. Till now the data centre and other requirements were taken as part of general expansion. But now the requirement is significant,” he said.

“As the ministry which is concerned with the interest, data centre, it concerns us that the power should be adequately provided. That should not become a bottleneck tomorrow,” Krishnan said.

The CapTable has learnt that the power companies including Adani Group have held initial meetings with the MeitY.

Globally, tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Meta are signing contracts to secure supply of nuclear power for their data centre facilities. The graphics processing units (GPU) chips, which are used for AI applications, consume greater power, and have massively pushed the overall power requirements of the data centre industry.