Billionaire Gautam Adani said he plans to ensure India becomes the world’s greenest data region as part of his 2030, US$70 billion energy investment roadmap.

He told an audience at the Bloomberg India Economic Forum that “it is inevitable that massive data centre infrastructure will become the largest energy-consuming industry to ever exist”.

However, the entrepreneur believes India can lead the way and his energy vision will come in hand to fight back polluting data centre infrastructure from even being built in the first place.

“[Adani’s future green energy production] will make us the greenest choice to warehouse not just India’s but perhaps much of the world’s data,” he said.

The tycoon added that by 2025, it is estimated an individual in the developed world will have one interaction with a data centre every 20 seconds.

With demand growing, especially aided by 5G adoption and edge computing, Adani told the room that there is a need to reimagine data centre designs.

He continued: “The Adani Group is well-positioned to benefit from this trend given our ability to build data centres, connect data centres, and provide 100% green power to data centres – a provision that will be hard to replicate at an economic scale elsewhere in the world.”

Energy roadmap

Adani’s $70 billion energy strategy is designed to make the group the world’s largest renewable energy company and produce the cheapest hydrogen on the planet, which the businessman called a “miracle fuel”.

Adani Green Energy Ltd (AGEL), already the world’s largest solar power developer, is aiming to produce 45GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030 and will invest $20 billion to develop a 2 GW per year solar manufacturing capacity by 2022-23.

Adani said: “By 2030, we expect to be the world’s largest renewable energy company without any caveat – and we have committed $70 billion over the next decade to make this happen. There is no other company that has yet made so large a bet on developing its sustainability infrastructure.

“We, therefore, believe the combination of our renewable capacity and the size of our investment makes us the leader among all global companies in the effort to produce cheap green electricity and green hydrogen.

“From an Adani perspective, we are very strongly positioned to produce the world’s least expensive hydrogen, which is expected to be an energy source plus feedstock for various industries that we intend to play in.”

Data centre play

Adani Group’s data centre play began last February when the company’s subsidiary Adani Enterprises (NSE: ADANIENT) entered a 50:50 joint venture (JV) with global data centre operator EdgeConneX.

The AdaniConneX JV will focus on building a network of hyperscale sites starting with the Chennai, Navi Mumbai, Noida, Vizag and Hyderabad markets. Development and construction at these sites have already begun.

In October, Adani Enterprises acquired a 130-acre piece of land in India’s south-eastern coastal region of Andhra Pradesh where it plans to build a largescale data centre and business park.

The land in Madhurawada within the port city of Visakhapatnam – also known as Vizag – was allotted by the regional government under the signature of chief minister Jaganmohan Reddy.

The development is also set to generate as many as 24,990 jobs contributing to the burgeoning national data centre economy.

It is still unclear at this stage whether the 130 acres plot of land in Madhurawada is part of the AdaniConneX JV.