One of India’s largest real estate developers Hiranandani Group has plans to invest over Rs 30,000 crore (US$3.88 billion) in building 24 data centre facilities across India through its IT business unit Yotta Infrastructure.

The investment represents a doubling of what Hiranandani envisioned when it launched Yotta in 2019.

Then, the capital expenditure was set at Rs 15,000 crore ($1.94 billion) over a period of five to seven years. The company might now spend double of that value in just five years.

Sunil Gupta, CEO, Yotta, told ETCIO: “The demand has been overwhelming for our first data centre in Mumbai. Being the only Tier IV certified data centre has also played a big role in this. It gives us more confidence to expand at an even more rapid pace.

“A building of the size we are constructing costs us about Rs 1,200 crore ($155.29 million). We are making five such in Mumbai, six in Noida, six in Chennai, three in Pune, three in Calcutta and one in Gujarat. The idea is to start the first building as a risk investment and then rapidly scale from there. Overall the investment could well surpass Rs 30,000 crore over the next five years.”

Beyond hyperscale data centres, Yotta has also recently unveiled plans to roll out an edge data centre network across the country in an investment drive evaluated at ₹900 crore ($135.28 million).

With the India data centre market fiercely expanding, the industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 12% during the period 2020−2026, when it is expected to cross US$8 billion worth of investments due to the increase of data traffic volume with AI and data analytics.

End-user spending on public cloud services in India is also on the rise and forecasted to total US$7.3 billion in 2022, an increase of 29.6% from 2021, according to Gartner, Inc.’s most recent data.

The number of active Internet users in India is projected to grow from 622 million in 2020 to over 900 million by 2025, driven by affordable smartphones and data tariffs.