Thus far, global giants were snapping up big parcels of land in India to build their offices, but they’re now looking to buy lands for other purposes as well.
Microsoft has bought a 48 acre parcel of land in Hyderabad to build a datacenter. The land is located 40 kms from the city, and was acquired at a value of around Rs. 267 crore. The Hyderabad datacenter will be an addition to Microsoft’s existing network of three datacenter regions in India in Pune, Mumbai, and Chennai.
The land for the datacenter was purchased from the land aggregator, Sai Balaji Developers, located in Ranga Reddy district, as per the document shared by Propstack, a data analytics firm. “Microsoft has big plans to expand its data centre business and will be developing one of the biggest data centres in the region. The property is located about forty kilometres from the main city of Hyderabad, and the company paid a premium on the land,” said a person aware of the deal. Microsoft already has a 54-acre India Development Center in Hyderabad which builds software and other services.
Microsoft isn’t the only global giant that’s opening datacenters in India. Google has planned to set up an 8-story, 381,000 sq ft data center in Navi Mumbai by 2025, with an investment of ₹1,144 crore in the first 10 years. Last year, Amazon had leased a 4-acre plot of land near Mumbai to build a datacenter, adding to the 5.5 acres it had leased previously.
Apart from these names, Equinix, a global data center company, entered the Indian market in 2020 and signed a deal to invest $161 million to facilitate a 19 MW data center operation in Mumbai. NTT, a Japanese telecom company, meanwhile acquired a 74% stake in Mumbai-based Netmagic Solutions and now operates 16 data centers across 13 campuses in India with a capacity of 205 MW. India’s Tata Communications operates 14 data centers across key cities.
India’s rapidly growing digital economy is fueling a surge in data consumption and storage needs, prompting all manner of companies to set up data centers in the country. The government’s push for a “Digital India” initiative, along with new data localization regulations, is further incentivizing companies to invest in local data center infrastructure. Additionally, the availability of renewable energy sources and the reclassification of data centers as infrastructure assets by the government are making India an attractive destination for data center investments. As a result, industry analysts forecast the Indian data center market to grow at a compound annual rate of 15% over the next few years, reaching a value of over $10 billion by 2027.