Hiranandani Group plans to build data centres under the brand Yotta

Real estate developer Hiranandani Group is foraying into the shared data centre space, where it will build and lease buildings to corporates to store their data.
 
The group plans to build data centres under the brand Yotta in Panvel, near Mumbai, and Chennai. It has hired Sunil Gupta as managing partner and CEO of Yotta.
 
In Panvel, the group plans to build a data centre park which, it claims, will be the country’s largest, spread over 18 acres. It will have five data centres and 30,000 racks.
 

The first building at the park will be launched this December, said Darshan Hiranandani, group CEO at Hiranandani Group; Rs 1,000 crore has been spent on it. “It is like building a school or hospital. It is a forward integration for us. Data centres have a huge potential,” he said. The company has built and sold such centres in the past, he said.

 
The second building will come up in December next year, he said, adding that the Chennai project is in the design stage.
 
Niranjan Hiranandani, chairman of the group, said that the firm aims to become a leader in the data centre space.  “We have big plans. We will fund it through internal accruals. We will build the scale and bring in partners,” he said.
 
Hiranandani, one of the biggest property developers, forayed into oil and gas with H-Energy in 2009. The company is currently developing LNG re-gasification terminals and cross-country pipelines on the west and the east coasts of the country.

 
H-Energy is planning to build a pipeline in West Bengal and two piplines from Jaigarh to Dhabol (in Maharashtra) and Mangaluru (in Karnataka).
 
Last year, the group announced its plans to build logistics parks. To begin with, the developer has earmarked land parcels at Talegaon in Pune, Nashik, Panvel, Chennai’s Oragadam and Durgapur near Kolkata.
 
The operating model of GreenBase, the company’s new vertical for industrial and logistics parks, includes built-to-suit industrial facilities, cold storage and built-to-suit warehouses for end customers, as well as large third-party logistics players.
 
In 2016, the Hiranandani brothers — Niranjan and Surendra — had sold their 4.5 million square feet Powai commercial property portfolio to Brookfield Asset Management for Rs 6,700 crore.