Beyond the cloud: The nuts and bolts of India’s data centre boom

Building a business plan for a new DC requires depth, and we soon realised that our primary competition is going to be global rather than local. Your biggest AI has completely changed the game; we have moved away from standard racks to GPU-heavy, high-density infrastructure. Global semiconductor shortages, coupled with massive demand, have resulted in lead times for these processors that are agonisingly long. Dependency on overseas suppliers leaves us vulnerable to global bottlenecks and fluctuations. This is not allowing us to forecast; hence, we need facilities designed to oversee multiple generations of hardware, and we need to cultivate a multi-vendor ecosystem so that a break in this chain does not bring deployment to a grinding halt.

DCs need water and power in enormous quantities. By 2030, DCs in India could potentially consume over 57 TWh of energy every year. Generating that from our legacy thermal-based grids is a recipe for an environmental disaster. We need to increase green energy investments 10-fold and unchanging Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) for renewables along with efficient supply chains for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) to ensure ‘lights-on’ DR when the grid is unstable. Now we deal with the risk of water; legacy cooling systems consume billions of litres of water annually–often in urban areas where water scarcity is already a reality. We must pivot by adopting advanced liquid cooling systems, rear-door heat exchangers, and zero-liquid-discharge systems. This needs to be a fundamental requirement for operating responsibly in India.

We treat the building, which houses the data centre, as just an empty shell to house the tech, but the architectural design is a critical link in the supply chain. The building needs to be efficient, else the whole operation could potentially bleed money and energy. We need the weaving of spatial optimisation and energy efficiency into the blueprints such that structures can take the load-bearing of denser AI racks at the same time optimise airflow while integrating renewable energy into the building’s façade. This can help us cut down on power wastage. The physical space needs to actively contribute to DCs sustainability, making it ‘net-positive’.

Land a rare commodity that serves as the base for hyperscalers’ growth, is becoming scarce in prime hubs like Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, or Bengaluru, though finding land to build is only half the battle. The other half is all about navigating a labyrinth of clearances–zoning laws, environmental impact assessment-detailed project reports (DPRs), power and water connectivity, and fire safety approvals. This maze of bureaucracy can easily turn a medium-term project into a multi-year headache. India currently needs these approvals to be streamlined if we want to move fast with a single-window clearance system at the national level. Dedicated data centre parks with plug-and-play utilities like an EV park could be a solution; we need to think differently than the rest of the world and keep experimenting till we reach a balance.

Bridging the talent gap The best hardware and the greenest power, entirely useless without the skills (people) which will run it. The AI-ready facilities are incredibly complex beasts and require deep expertise from cloud architecture to advanced thermodynamics. Every time we discuss the future of DCs in India, we end up at a common point: this industry is desperate for fresh, highly skilled talent. Currently, there is a shortage of specialised professionals over the next decade. Leaders of all educational institutions and industries need to team up to build programs and academic tracks tailored to these unique challenges. We need to actively guide the next generation because without them our shiny new infrastructure will not run.