The Storage Boom

Data centres are being built at a frenetic pace in india as companies scramble to meet the ballooning demand from mobile phone users and firms adopting al. Can the country’s energy infrastructure keep up?

- RAHUL OBEROI

INDIANS ARE FIRMLY hooked on to their mobile phones. From buying vegetables to studying online, from watching videos and making reels to filling up job applications, they use it for almost everything. It shows in the data.

An average Indian cell phone user consumes more than 19 gigabytes (GB) of data per month, the highest in the world. Nearly 80% of the country’s population owns a mobile phone, which works out to a whopping 1.13 billion handsets. And data consumption is expected to jump manifold because of the increased adoption of data-intensive technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that require a lot of computational power.

With all that data flowing around, India Inc. is rushing to build the conduits to help this new oil reach the farthest corners of the country. It is investing heavily in data centres to make the most of this opportunity. Global real estate services and investment firm CBRE believes that the value of India’s data centre market will soar from $4.35 billion in 2021 to a projected $10.09 billion by 2027.

That has forced established players in this space like CtrlS Datacenters and Yotta to increase their capacity to fend off challengers big and small, from conglomerates like the Adani Group and Reliance Industries to relatively smaller entrants like Anant Raj Limited.

The government, too, is working actively to put India at the forefront of this development. It has been promoting data centres and localised data storage by classifying them as essential infrastructure, like roads and energy, also keeping in mind the emerging geopolitical situation. The government’s ₹10,000-crore AI initiative will be instrumental in creating a network of high-performance data centres available for lease to industry stakeholders, enabling them to train and develop AI models effectively.