Digital Realty, Reliance, Brookfield partner to develop India data centres

India continues to see growth in its data centre industry. Digital Realty has announced a joint venture with Reliance Industries and Brookfield Infrastructure to develop data centres in India.

The new venture aims to meet the critical infrastructure needs needs of enterprises and digital services companies in the country.

Reuters reported that Reliance will invest £95 million ($122.24 million) to build data centres alongside Brookfield and Digital Realty. The three companies will hold a 33.3% share in the joint venture known as Digital Connexion.

“India is a mostly untapped market for the data centre industry, driven by the rapid adoption of digital business models, the world’s largest population, and a government that recognises the role of technology for future economic development,” said Serene Nah, Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacific of Digital Realty.

In its first instance, the companies will develop data centre campuses existing strategic land parcels it owns in Chennai and Mumbai.

“Data centres provide essential services and critical infrastructure to support the digitalisation that is taking place in every aspect of life in India. We are very pleased to expand our existing partnership with Reliance and add their deep expertise in the Indian telecom, tech and data landscape to the platform,” said Arpit Agrawal, Managing Director and Head of Infrastructure for India & Middle East at Brookfield.

As part of the Digital Connextion venture, Reliance Industries’ telecom arm known as Reliance Jio will be involved. Jio’s connectivity network covers approximately ~99.5% of India’s population. This will extend the reach of Digital Realty’s data centre platform in India, a key market for the operator.

Jio will also be provided with compute capacity for its high-definition live content, VR experiences, cloud gaming, immersive shopping experiences, and cloud PC services.

“We would like to thank the Indian Government for granting infrastructure status to data centres and for creating a favorable ecosystem for their development and operations, which is critical for India’s vision to become a $1 trillion digital economy by 2025,” said Kiran Thomas, CEO of Jio Platforms.

The India data centre market is forecast to grow at 40% per year until 2025, with a total investment of $20 billion. This is expected to be driven by the growing adoption of digital technologies, increase in cloud computing, and the surge in data consumption fuelling the demand for robust and scalable data centre infrastructure.

Digital expansion in the age of AI

With the increasing adoption of digital services and the rapid deployment of AI, companies are eager to capitalise on this advancing technology.

Digital Realty recently announced the opening of their first NVIDIA DGX H100-ready data centre in Osaka, Japan. The infrastructure is said to provide the computational power needed to train present and future state-of-the-art deep learning AI models.

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