More than 70 per cent of India’s data centre capacity is expected to be built within five years, driven by AI, storage and enterprise demand.
NEW DELHI
More than 70 per cent of India’s data centre infrastructure capacity is expected to be built over the next five to six years, driven by demand for local data storage, artificial intelligence workloads and enterprise applications, Microsoft India & South Asia President Puneet Chandok said.
Chandok said the expansion will be supported by growing requirements for AI inferencing and infrastructure needed to run tools built on frontier artificial intelligence reasoning and language models. Rising demand for local data storage is also expected to contribute to the country’s data centre growth over the coming years.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Microsoft AI Infrastructure Summit in New Delhi on Monday, Chandok said upcoming data centres in India would need to establish high environmental standards. He said the facilities should focus on developing green infrastructure with net-zero water consumption.
According to Chandok, companies operating across the data centre ecosystem will need to address water use as capacity expands. He said the industry should find ways to replenish and return significantly more water to the ecosystem than it consumes each year. This approach, he indicated, would be important as India develops a large amount of new data centre infrastructure.
The projected expansion comes as India’s technology ecosystem faces increasing requirements for computing infrastructure and locally stored data. The next five to six years are therefore expected to see a substantial build-out of capacity, with AI workloads and data localisation among the key factors shaping investment and infrastructure development. Chandok said the new facilities should combine technological capability with environmental responsibility as India strengthens its position in the global data centre landscape.