Brookfield buys 30 acre land near Mumbai for Rs 600 cr to build data centre

In one of the biggest land deals in the country in the last couple of years, Canada's Brookfield has bought a 30 acre land parcel in Navi Mumbai, a satellite town of Mumbai, for Rs 600 crore from K Raheja Corp, sources said.

Brookfield plans to build a data centre on the plot.

K Raheja Corp, which bought the land parcel in the Ghansoli area of Navi Mumbai from US chemicals company Cabot Corporation in 2015 for Rs 210 crore, would be making three times the returns from the sale of the land parcel to Brookfield.

According to real estate experts the price paid by Brookfield is in line with the market price.

Brookfield Infrastructure, part of Brookfield, recently formed a joint venture with NYSE listed Digital Realty for setting up and operating data centres in the country under the brand BAM Digital Realty.

Brookfield did not comment on the story, neither did K Raheja Corp.

The Brookfield JV is also looking to buy land parcels in the other parts of the country to set up data centres, sources said.

The JV would expand Brookfield Infrastructure’s global data infrastructure portfolio, which includes $23 billion in assets across data transmission, distribution and storage. It has 139,000 operational telecom wireless towers in the country and intends to expand to 175,000 in the near term.

With the growing need for digital connectivity to work, learn and play leading to a sharp rise in data usage, the demand for data centres, too, has soared.

Betting on this demand, several global operators such as Yondr, Digital Realty and EdgeConneX have set up joint ventures with Indian companies or Indian arms of global companies or fund managers.

Real estate demand for data centres is expected to jump by 15-18 million sq ft in the next four to five years, property consultant Savills said recently. It estimates that the data centres' demand in India between 2021 and 2025 will touch over 2,500 Megawatt (MW) with the adoption of 5G, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and increased use of cloud services and in smart cities. Data Centres have been one of those real estate asset classes that are least affected by the Covid-19-related crisis across the globe including in India, said Savills. “The Indian data centre market,” it added, “is likely to exhibit a higher growth rate than the world average.”

Indian data centres witnessed a record absorption of 102 MW during 2020, as various organisations leaned on them to keep their businesses operational, JLL said.

Recent big land deals

Buyer	Seller	City	Price
Godrej Fund Management	Century group	Bangalore	Rs 850 crore
Godrej Fund Management	Puravankara	Bangalore	Rs 700 crore
Brookfield	K Raheja Corp	Mumbai	Rs 600 crore
Godrej Fund Management	local land owner	Pune	Rs 300 crore