Latest addition. CapitaLand India Trust to invest ₹1,940 crore to develop data centre project in Chennai

CapitaLand India Trust will invest ₹1,940 crore to develop a data centre project in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

CapitaLand India Trust Management Pte Ltd, the trustee-manager of CapitaLand India Trust (CLINT), is acquiring a 4.01-acre freehold site in Ambattur, Chennai for ₹83.28 crore to develop its third data centre in India.

"CLINT will invest an estimated total amount of ₹1,940 crore (about Singapore dollar 328.8 million) to acquire the site and develop a state-of-the-art data centre in phases over the next four to five years," a company statement said.

The data centre will have a power capacity of 55 megawatts (MW) to host customers such as global technology giants and cloud service providers as well as large domestic enterprise clients.

The acquisition of the site is expected to be completed by December 2022. The data centre is scheduled to be completed by end-2025.

Sanjeev Dasgupta, Chief Executive Officer of CLINT, said: "With this latest acquisition, CLINT will have a presence in India's key data centre markets—Navi Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai—and we are also planning to develop a fourth data centre in Bengaluru."

"This will allow us to expand in the resilient and highly scalable data centre asset class, diversify our data centre portfolio geographically, and enable us to better serve our customers across the country," he said.

India's data consumption and demand for information technology (IT) solutions are fast expanding but the country has one of the world's lowest data centre densities, Dasgupta pointed out.

"We will be developing a data centre in Navi Mumbai and another two data centres within our International Tech Parks in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Our data centres will further enhance the quality of CLINT's portfolio and deliver sustainable returns to unitholders," he said.

Patrick Boocock, CEO, Private Equity Alternative Assets, CapitaLand Investment, said the company has been seeing rising investor interest in the digital infrastructure sector and it is actively working on a pipeline of data centre deals across Asia.

"India is a particularly interesting market; in the last five years, $14 billion has been invested in India's data centre sector, and the amount is expected to cross $20 billion by 2025," he said.

CapitaLand's strong core competencies in data centre design, development and operations will "enable us to seize opportunities in the country as we build our new economy portfolio globally".

Chennai is India's second largest data centre co-location market with current IT load capacity of 88 MW (about 12 per cent share of India's total capacity).

Surajit Chatterjee, Managing Director, Data Centre, India, CapitaLand Investment, said: "The acquisition site is in a prime data centre location in Ambattur, close to sea cable landing stations, reliable power supply and has a well-developed infrastructure." When fully developed, he said, the data centre will have the capacity to host approximately 4,900 racks and operate at an efficient power usage effectiveness of approximately 1.45.

After completion, the four data centres will deliver a total of 251 MW of power.

The acquisition and development of the data centre in Chennai will increase CLINT's total portfolio size (inclusive of committed investment pipeline) by 1.7 per cent from approximately 25.3 million square feet to 25.7 million square feet.

CLINT, formerly known as Ascendas India Trust (a-iTrust), was listed on the Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Limited (SGX-ST) in August 2007 as the first Indian property trust in Asia.

Its principal objective is to own income-producing real estate used primarily as business space in India. CLINT may also develop and acquire land or uncompleted developments primarily to be used as business space, with the objective of holding the properties upon completion.

CLINT's assets under management stood at Singapore dollar 2.5 billion.

Its portfolio includes eight world-class IT business parks, one logistics park, one industrial facility and one data centre development in India, with total completed floor area of 15.5 million square feet spread across Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Mumbai.