RIL partners to expand India’s data centre business
Author: Isha Jain
Reliance Industries (RIL) has announced that it is entering into an agreement to invest alongside Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty in its Indian SPVs setup for developing data centres in India. RIL will hold 33.33% stake in each of the Indian SPVs and become an equal partner.
Digital Realty Trust has a joint venture (JV) with Brookfield Infrastructure, that is developing high quality, highly connected, scalable data centres, to meet the critical infrastructure needs of enterprises and digital services companies in India. RIL will become an equal partner in the JV. The JV will be branded as ‘Digital Connexion: A Brookfield, Jio and Digital Realty Company.’
The JV is currently developing data centres in marquee locations of Chennai and Mumbai. Its first 20MW greenfield data centre (MAA10), on a 100MW campus in Chennai, is expected to be completed by the end of 2023. The JV recently announced the acquisition of 2.15ac of land in Mumbai to build a 40MW data centre. Given the location of these sites, the data centres will be connected to critical terrestrial connectivity infrastructure, as well as undersea cables, and will become hubs for global connectivity for Indian companies and a gateway into India for multinational companies.
Data centre capacity in India is expected to increase multi-fold over the next few years. Indians are already amongst the largest mobile data consumers globally. This will further increase significantly with increasing access to various digital services like OTT platforms, gaming and the ongoing 5G rollout. Adoption of 5G use cases by enterprises will lead to the adoption of data-intensive technologies like IoT and AI. The ongoing innovations in generative AI technology have been enabled by hardware and data centre infrastructure, and the requirement of these is only set to increase exponentially. There is also an increased emphasis on localisation of personal data within the country. These drivers will significantly increase the data centre and compute capacity requirements of the country.
It will be well positioned to serve global and local enterprises, SMBs and the vibrant start-ups of India, for their cloud and colocation requirements, as they move compute resources on the cloud and off-premise.
Data centres developed by the JV will leverage Digital Realty’s energy efficient data centre platform design and operating procedures, highly repeatable Pervasive Data Centre Architecture (PDx) approach and relationships with global customers, Brookfield’s in-depth knowledge of the Indian infrastructure market, and Jio’s massive digital and connectivity ecosystem and strong enterprise relationships with an existing client base of 80% of large named private enterprises in India.
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