India to see exponential growth in data centre business: WD sales director

Owais Mohammed of Western Digital forecasts strong growth for India's storage and data centre business, driven by AI workloads, hyperscalers, and government incentives for long-term investment

India will remain one of the few markets globally to see exponential growth in the storage and data centre business over the next couple of years, Owais Mohammed, the sales director for India, the Middle East, and Africa at Western Digital, said.

 

The total capacity in India for data centres is likely to double over the next couple of years, and high double-digit growth in the sector will likely continue for some time, he said.

 

Most of this growth, Mohammed said, was driven by hyperscalers, which has also caused shortages in both the flash and hard disk drive (HDD) segments.

 

“Hyperscalers prioritise fast, predictable capacity expansion because AI is creating sustained demand for long-lived data, training sets, model versions, inference logs, and compliance archives that don’t get deleted quickly. That’s translating into rapid adoption of higher-capacity nearline drives and clear interest in next-gen technologies as they plan storage growth at exabyte scale,” he said.

 

Western Digital, which has rebranded as WD, shipped 3.5 million units of its 32TB nearline HDD in the last quarter and expects to ship 4 million units this year. The company expects a 25 per cent annual growth in nearline storage exabytes over the next five years, largely fuelled by AI workloads, Mohammed said.

 

“Even in AI-centric data centres, around 80 per cent of hyperscale storage capacity continues to reside on HDDs, because at that scale, cost, density, and power efficiency matter. As a result, HDDs remain the most practical and sustainable foundation for storing and managing AI data at hyperscale,” he said.

 

Most experts believe that the Budget 2026's announcement of a tax break till 2047 for setting up data centres in India sends a clear long-term signal that India is planning for artificial intelligence infrastructure at scale and not in cycles.

 

India’s data centre industry, which has been growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 24 per cent since 2019, is expected to add 795 MW of new capacity by the end of 2027, taking the entire capacity to 1825 MW, according to an analysis by JLL.