India is home to over 80 third-party data centers and investments come from both local and international players that are expected to touch $4.6 billion per annum by 2025. The tech services provider NTT Limited, for instance, is currently operating 10 data centres in four major cities with 1.5 million square feet of operational space and over 150 MW power capacity.

It has already announced an investment of $2 billion in India over a period of four years. “We are expanding our data centre network to build infrastructure that is at the core of our full-stack product offerings,” said Vimal Kaw, head of data centre services at NTT India.

Yotta Infrastructure is data centre solutions provider and ready with its second structure, Yotta NM2, with a capacity of 9000 racks that can go live in less than nine months. In addition, Gupta added the company has also signed a deal with the Tamil Nadu government to build a data center park in Chennai. The facility will have a capacity of 150MW and 25,000 racks spread across five buildings. “We have announced an investment of Rs. 8,500 crore to set up a logistics and hyperscale data center park in West Bengal,” he added, saying the company has a roadmap to deliver 1030MW capacity across Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Delhi-NCR by 2027.

The Indian data centre market currently holds an estimated 445 MW of critical IT capacity in seven cities–Mumbai, NCR, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata, according to a December 23 report by property consultants Knight Frank.

The country’s has a growing data creation as well as consumption is adding to this growth. The data explosion is being driven by the emerging use cases around artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and the internet of things (IoT).

Hyderabad-headquartered CtrlS Datacenters, for instance, is planning an additional capacity of over five million square feet across India, including cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, and Noida. All of this capacity will be available to customers in the next 24 to 36 months in a phased manner, said B.S. Rao, vice president, Marketing at CtrlS Datacenters.

The company has planned to set up more than 25 data centres across the cities mentioned above.

Rao said the company operates 1.25 million square feet of data centers in India, accounting for 18 percent of the country’s total data center footprint. “With the planned addition of yet another 5.3 million square feet, the combined footprint for CtrlS will stand at 6.55 million square feet.”