India’s ever-growing data consumption has spurred the need to store and process data, which has increased the demand for data centres in the country. With data protection and security becoming the top priority for countries, local storage of data has become increasingly critical.
A data centre is a physical space composed of networked computers, storage systems and computing infrastructure used by organisations to store, assemble, process and distribute large amounts of data.
India’s data centre capacity has been growing rapidly and is at 637 MW in H1 2022 which is expected to double to 1318 MW by 2024. The data centre industry was valued at $385 million in 2024 and has grown by 216 per cent to $ 1.2 billion in 2021.
The number of data centres in India is 138 as on March 2022, which is projected to reach 183 by 2025. Although the number of data centres has been growing at a healthy rate in the last few years, globally USA dominates with over 2,700 data centres. Next comes Germany with 487 data centres. India ranks 13th globally among countries with the highest number of data centres.
Among cities, Mumbai continues to lead with the highest share of data centres. Close to half of the data centres in India are in Mumbai and are projected to remain so until 2025. Behind Mumbai are Bengaluru and Chennai, with 13 per cent and 10 per cent shares respectively. Chennai’s share of data centre capacity is expected to grow to 15 per cent by 2025 while Bengaluru’s is expected to drop to 11 during the same period.
Mumbai bagged the majority of the supply and absorption in H1 2022 with Chennai following among the top cities.