Colt Data Centre lines up Rs 6.2K cr for Mumbai, Chennai units in 5 years

Colt Data Centre Services (DCS) will invest 750 million US dollars – about Rs 6230 crore – in building data centre capacity at new facilities in Mumbai and Chennai in the next three to five years, company executives told Business Standard after launching its first facility in Mumbai.

Based in Navi Mumbai, the new data centre sits on a land parcel of 15 acres and is capable of supporting 120 Megawatts (MW) of IT power capacity. The company is also working on the next Phase-II to ramp up this capacity to 150 MW, depending on demand.

"So far we have invested 150 million US dollars in the Phase-I and in the next three to five years we are contemplating another about 750 million US dollars. So roughly, our plan for the next three to five years is about 850 million US dollars of total investment," said Pratap Mane, Country Head of India at Colt DCS.

Backed by Fidelity Investments, Colt DCS provides data centre solutions to global cloud hyperscalers and large enterprise customers from its 16 carrier-neutral data centres spanning in eight cities across Europe and Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

Currently, Colt has an operational capacity of 162 MW globally, which may grow to 944 MW as per the expansion roadmap. The new centre in Mumbai is the largest facility of Colt DCS. The company expects the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector to be a growth driver in the near future.

Quy Nguyen, Vice President, Sales, Marketing and Customer Experience at Colt DCS said: "The decision to launch a new business in India was taken back in 2018. We felt India was on the edge of being the next growth engine globally. As it turned out, with COVID-19 hitting, it took us longer than we expected (two to three years) to launch the data centre."

The company is close to completing the land acquisition for building a new data centre in Chennai and the facility is expected to start operations in the next two years. Spread across 10 acres, the data centre may have a capacity of another 120 MW.

According to leading real estate consulting companies, India's demand for data centre capacity will reach 1.4 GW by 2025. Navi Mumbai accounts for around 50 per cent of the current data centre capacity in the country.

Emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) use cases is expected to further increase the demand for data centre capacity. According to an estimate by Tirias Research, the generative AI data centre server infrastructure and operating costs may exceed 76 billion US dollars by 2028.

"While the cloud adoption has slowed a little bit, the introduction of AI has more than made up for any slowdown. We are just now starting to see AI-specific application deployments with up to hundreds of Megawatts of requirement. So overall, the demand from the cloud service providers is at an all-time high. We basically can't build fast enough for them at the moment," Nguyen said.