In its first foray into the data centre space, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), on Monday, signed an agreement to invest alongside Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty in their Indian SPVs set up for developing data centres in India. RIL will hold a 33.33 per cent stake in each of the Indian SPVs and become an equal partner.
Digital Realty Trust, Inc is the largest provider of cloud and carrier-neutral data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions globally with 300+ data centres across 27 countries. They have a joint venture with Brookfield Infrastructure that is developing high-quality, highly-connected, scalable data centres to meet the critical infrastructure needs of enterprises and digital services companies in India. RIL will become an equal partner in the JV. The JV will be branded as ‘Digital Connexion: A Brookfield, Jio and Digital Realty Company’.
The JV is currently developing data centres in marquee locations of Chennai and Mumbai. The JV’s first 20 megawatt (MW) greenfield data centre (MAA10), on a 100 MW campus in Chennai, is expected to be completed by the end of 2023. The JV recently announced the acquisition of 2.15 acres of land in Mumbai, to build a 40 MW data centre. Given the location of these sites, the data centres will be connected to critical terrestrial connectivity infrastructure, as well as undersea cables, and will become hubs for global connectivity for Indian companies and gateways into India for multinational companies, a company statement said.
Data center capacity in India is expected to increase multi-fold over the next few years. This will further increase significantly with increasing access to various digital services like OTT platforms and gaming and the ongoing 5G roll-out. Adoption of 5G use cases by enterprises will lead to the adoption of data-intensive technologies like internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). The ongoing innovations in generative AI technology have been enabled by hardware and data centre infrastructure, and the requirement of these is only set to increase exponentially.
Data centres developed by the JV will leverage Digital Realty’s industry-leading energy-efficient data centre platform design and operating procedures, highly-repeatable Pervasive Data Center Architecture (PDx®) approach and relationships with global customers, Brookfield’s in-depth knowledge of the Indian infrastructure market, and Jio’s massive digital and connectivity ecosystem and very strong enterprise relationships with an existing client base of 80 per cent of large named private enterprises in India.
Kiran Thomas, CEO, Jio Platforms Limited, said, “The partnership will help us serve our enterprise and SMB clients with cutting-edge, plug-and-play solutions delivered from the cloud and lead their digital transformation and make them more competitive and efficient.. We would like to thank the Indian government for granting infrastructure status to data centres and for creating a favourable ecosystem for their development and operations, which is critical for India’s vision to become a $1 Trillion digital economy by 2025.”
Arpit Agrawal, Managing Director, Head of Infrastructure, India & Middle East, Brookfield, added, “Data Centres provide essential services and critical infrastructure to support the digitalization that is taking place in every aspect of life in India. Together with Reliance and Digital Realty, we look forward to providing the best of solutions to the digital transformation needs of Indian and global corporates.”
Serene Nah, Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacific, Digital Realty, said, “India is a mostly untapped market for the data centre industry driven by the rapid adoption of digital business models, the world’s largest population, and a government that recognises the role of technology for future economic development. This joint venture brings together three global leaders in digital infrastructure to accelerate Digital India by developing, owning and operating institutional quality carrier-and cloud neutral data centers across India.”
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