Billionaire Mukesh Ambani on January 7 said his firm Reliance Industries in partnership with Canada's Brookfield will open a data centre in Chennai next week, marking entry into the fast-growing market. Reliance had in July last year invested about Rs 378 crore to enter an existing joint venture, where Brookfield Infrastructure and US-based realty estate investment trust Digital Realty were already partners. The three own 33 percent each in the venture.

Speaking at the Tamil Nadu Global Investors Meet here, Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Ltd, said his group is investing in renewable energy and green hydrogen as well as in setting up a data center in the state. "Reliance has partnered with Canada's Brookfield asset management and US-based Digital Reality to set up a state-of-the-art data center, which will be opened next week," he said.

The Indian data centers market, which is expected to grow 40 percent a year and draw USD 5 billion in investments by 2025, is heating up with Reliance's entry to rival Gautam Adani's Adani Group and Sunil Mittal's Bharti Airtel Ltd. in recent months. Datacenter and compute capacity requirements in India are set to jump on the growing localisation of personal data, increasing access to digital services and adoption of data-intensive technologies like artificial intelligence among other drivers.