India’s data industry is worth $5.6 billion, set to expand more by 2025

Presently, India has 138 data centers overall spanning 11 million square feet and having 737 MW of IT capacity (building ready). Currently, Mumbai and Chennai have around 57% of this capacity.

As demand increased after the Covid-19 pandemic, over 45 data centers spanning about 13 million square feet and 1,015 MW of IT capacity are planned to come up in the country by 2025-end.

After the new planned supply, the country will have 183 data centers totaling approximately 24 million square feet and at least 1,752 MW of total IT capacity. Over 69% of this new planned IT capacity will come from the two top cities- Mumbai and Chennai.

“India is at the cusp of a data center evolution,” the consultants said.

Co-location data centers which were once a small, fragmented industry are rapidly transforming themselves into a large, consolidated industry. “The current size of the India data center industry is about USD 5.6 billion and is bound to grow,” said Devi Shankar, President – of Industrial & Logistics and Data Centres at Anarock Capital.

The data center business was provided with an unexpected tailwind called Covid-19 after which the business is propelling faster.

“Technology adoption and digitization across the sectors were fast-tracked globally and India also leap-frogged at least a decade in the last couple of years. The country’s total estimated data center demand is expected to be 2,100 MW as of FY2025, with a mix between hyperscalers and enterprises – 35:65 (excluding self-owned hyperscale capacity),” Shankar said.

The report also claims that there is still a potential of around 2,688 MW of future unplanned supply in the country. Land for these future supplies is already locked by the operators but planning in these types of projects is usually based on previous results.

“Companies are really starting to relook where they are putting their operations globally, where they would like to relocate and where they want to manufacture, distribute and set up their database and technology facilities. Data centers are currently a fulcrum for a lot of the decision-making, especially in the Asia Pacific and in India,” said Jeff Binwanger, Managing Partner at Binswanger.

The report also quoted a survey that analyzed the trends in the Indian data center industry. The survey conducted on the IT professionals in Indian companies targeted data managers from diverse industries and company sizes. It recorded the perception of professionals who manage data-related infrastructure within their organizations.

“30 percent of companies are looking at hybrid (cloud data center) hosting services for data management. IT Infrastructure monitoring, assessment and design are top services that IT professionals are keen to outsource,” the consultants said.

The top priorities of IT professionals are to bring operational efficiencies and cost minimization to their data centers. They are also looking towards data compression, improving power usage effectiveness and technology improvements.

“58 percent of IT professionals feel co-location is better than captive data centers. 72 percent of professionals have witnessed data surges in their organizations post-Covid-19. 64 percent of organizations are looking to power their data centers by more than 60 percent clean power in the next 2 years,” the report said.

Around 67% of recruiters face challenges in hiring and retaining good IT talent.

With Inputs from PTI.

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