Tata Communications to Invest $200 Million to Double Data Centres in India

Global Internet solutions provider Tata Communications on Wednesday said that it has plans to invest $200 million over a period of three years to double its data centre capacity in India.

"We plan to invest more than $200 million towards doubling capacity in India from 5 lakh square feet to 10 lakh square feet over a period of three years," Tata Communications' Growth Ventures CEO Rangu Salgame told PTI while announcing the launch of second data centre in Delhi.

The new data centre launched at Greater Kailash in Delhi is spread over 1 lakh square feet.

"Typically a data centre takes approximately 5 years to reach to equilibrium with respect to capacity, however, in well positioned and well strategic locations it could be faster. For example, 95 percent of the data that is there today was created in the last 12 months. So that's the scale at which data is exploding," Salgame said.

The company now has data centres at 44 locations globally. In India, Tata Communications has data centres in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai and Pune.

He said data centre market is growing in India at over 20 percent compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) year-on-year and Tata Communications business is growing a bit faster than the market rate.

Salgame said that growth of India is fuelling growth for data centre business, followed by privacy and security issue which is pushing companies to store data within the boundary of country rather than in any foreign country.

"Multinational companies who are doing well in India are also looking for storing data within the country," he said.

Salgame declined to name global companies using Tata Communications' data centre but acknowledged that a global social media company is also using its facility in India.

Tata Communications has deployed green technologies that can bring down operational cost of data centres like free cooling chillers, rainwater harvesting, solar power etc.

"For the overall data centre business in India, we have 26 percent of our power coming from green source, which makes us the most green data centre company," Salgame said.