Data centre industry sees major India opportunity as Govt moves to resolve power, approval bottlenecks

Industry representatives said several concerns were addressed during the meeting, while subcommittees have been formed to take up issues that require further discussion.

Devin Narang, Chairman of Turner & Townsend, a programme and project management consultancy, said representatives from different government departments and state governments participated in the meeting, helping resolve several concerns raised by the industry.

"A lot of issues were raised. A lot of issues were resolved by the minister on the spot, for example, power issues, ease of doing business and how we can expand this whole industry," Narang said.

He said subcommittees had also been created to deal with matters that could not be resolved immediately.

"Subcommittees have been formed to further go into the details of what was not resolved on the table, and that will be resolved within a time-bound programme," he said.

Narang estimated that the data centre sector represented a USD 700-800 billion opportunity for India. He said the industry also raised concerns over the time taken to secure power connectivity, power surges and the availability of skilled manpower.

"As the data centre industry expands, we do not have the trained manpower. We are now exploring to see if we could set up centres in India where manpower could be trained to take up the necessary skills required for data centers," he said.

Rachit Mohan of JLL, a US-headquartered multinational company, said the discussions covered the entire chain needed for the development of data centres, including power infrastructure, land, construction and environmental approvals.

"We looked at power infrastructure, land, construction, approvals, environment approvals - the entire value chain which is helping large global demand as well as Indian cloud demand for actually delivering their data center supply in India," Mohan said.

He added that the Union minister had outlined a vision of attracting USD 200 billion of investment into the sector.

"Minister has a vision of USD 200 billion of investment coming into the Indian data center industry. And with this kind of workforce put together, we are very confident that this is something which will be achievable," he said.

Himani Agrawal, Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft India and South Asia, said the roundtable focused on making it easier to do business in the sector and highlighted Microsoft's expanding hyperscale infrastructure in India.

"We as Microsoft have the largest hyperscale infrastructure with four regions, and our latest region, Hyderabad, is AI-ready from day one, which is enabling India not just to participate in AI demand, but to shape it for the global AI economy," Agrawal said.

Sudhir Prasad, CEO of Tower Vision India, said India's relatively competitive infrastructure and operating costs could support further growth of the industry.

"India, in terms of CAPEX and OPEX, both infrastructure cost and running cost, is amongst the lowest in the world," Prasad said, adding that the country's data centre industry was "just the beginning".

The need to keep Indian data within the country also emerged during the discussions.

Yogesh Kochhar, President of Yotta Foundation, said India needed to build greater domestic capacity for hosting sovereign data.

"We need to host our own data, sovereign data, on sovereign land by ourselves. That's the critical and key point that we raised with the minister," Kochhar said.

He said the organisation was also looking to host a sovereign data centre conclave and that Goyal had agreed to participate.

Kochhar added that India currently has fewer data centres compared with developed markets and said expanding such infrastructure would be critical as artificial intelligence increases demand for computing capacity.

"Data is the new lifeblood of the economy today, and India needs to gear itself up to be able to address the data center opportunity that is evolving in the world," he said. (ANI)