BAM Digital Realty to invest ₹2,000 cr to build data centre in Mumbai

BAM Digital Realty, a joint venture between Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty, on Tuesday, announced the acquisition of 2.15 acres of land in Chandivali, Mumbai, to build a new data center, its second in India. With an estimated investment of more than ₹2,000 crore ($250 million), the facility will deliver 35 megawatts (MW) of IT load upon completion, bringing the company’s total planned capacity in India to 135 megawatts (MW), the company said.

In February, the company started the construction work on the country’s first data center facility in Chennai. Located at Ambattur Industrial Estate BAM said it is expected to be operational later this year.

The Mumbai data centre was selected for its proximity to customers and central location in metro Mumbai. This, according to the company makes it a well-connected facility capable of supporting the growing demand for critical digital infrastructure in this region.

Arpit Agrawal, Managing Director, Head of Infrastructure, India and Middle East, Brookfield Infrastructure Group, said, “Mumbai continues to be a prominent data centre hub reinforced by the ongoing rapid expansion of the Indian data centre industry that is fuelling the country's significant digital transformation. As we expand our presence in India and enter the Mumbai market, we are strengthening our mission to offer the highest level of innovation and expertise to our local and global customers.”

Together, the two state-of-the-art data centres in Mumbai and Chennai will deliver rich ecosystem access to both west- and east-bound customers, leveraging Digital Realty’s global data center platform, PlatformDIGITAL, the company said in a statement.

India is vying to become the world’s third largest economy by 2027, driven by increased digitalisation. This has led to exponential data growth and in turn is the demand for data centre capacity in India has risen drastically.

According to a research report by Avendus Capital published in May this year, Indian data centre market is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 40% and is expected to attract investments of about $5 billion by 2025. It is also expected to reach an installed capacity of 1,400 MW by the end of 2025.

In May, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a ₹1,05,600 crore ($12.7 billion) investment in India to expand its cloud infrastructure by 2030. Earlier this year, Microsoft pledged another ₹16,000 crore to set up data centres in Hyderabad. Apart from this, NTT and Google continue to expand capacity in the country.

Over the last three years, the Indian data centre market grew by over 48% from 540 MW in 2019 to over 800 MW of installed capacity in 2022 as demand for digital transformation across businesses took off amidst the pandemic.

Among cities, Mumbai currently accounts for around 48% of the country’s total data centre capacity of 800 MW with use cases like submarine landing stations and reliable power capacity. The city also has a total capacity of about 380 MW, with another 530 MW under construction driven by cloud players aggressively absorbing space in the city. 

This is followed by Bengaluru with 110 MW total capacity and 70 MW under construction. Most of the demand here comes from the startups and ecommerce companies. Seven cities contribute close to 92% of the total capacity in India. Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata have the largest total data centre capacity currently under construction.