Japan’s NTT Ltd, a global information technology infrastructure and services company, will invest $300 million in its hyperscale data centre (DC) campus in Chennai, which is equipped with a new subsea cable system. As part of the investment, the company on Thursday announced the launch of its Chennai 2 DC campus, while construction for the second phase has commenced, said Sharad Sanghi, Chairman, NTT Global Data Centers & Cloud Infrastructure India Pvt Ltd.
The investment is part of the $2-billion infusion that NTT announced four years ago, he told newspersons. “We are on track to invest that amount, and investing around $500 million every year in India,” he added.
In India, the company enjoys 22 per cent market share in the DC segment. “We grew at 40 per cent last year,” he said without giving the absolute number.
NTT Ltd has IT load of 204.8 MW in India till date. By March 2024, it will have an additional IT load of 144.4 MW to take the total to 349.2 MW, said Shekhar Sharma, CEO and Managing Director, NTT Global Data Centers & Cloud Infrastructure India Ltd.
With the launch of its Chennai 2 DC campus, NTT’s DC footprint in India has grown to 16 facilities, encompassing 3.1 million sq ft and 205 MW of IT power.
The company already has a small DC facility in the city. The new centre, with 34.8 MW IT load, comes with a new subsea cable system — named MIST (Malaysia, India, Singapore and Thailand) — which is India’s first 12-fibre pair cable landing capable of carrying more than 200 TBPS of data, he said.
Sharma said Chennai’s location opened three distinct opportunities for the DC projects addressing the demand for high-quality data infrastructure, driven by the city’s thriving digital ecosystem; the positioning of the city as a disaster recovery site for companies with primary IT infrastructure in other Indian cities; and leveraging global connectivity to offer data centre capacity to markets in Southeast Asia like Singapore, where capacity is in short supply. These capabilities will transform Chennai into a global gateway, connecting India to Southeast Asia and the world, he said.
A data centre is a building or a dedicated space within a building housing computer systems and associated components, such as telecom and storage systems.
JLL’s Data Centre Update: H2 2022 report predicts that the increasing use of digital technology, the migration of IT infrastructure to third-party providers, and the growing usage of data from new and existing channels will result in the addition of 678 MW to the digital transformation industry between 2023 and 2025 in India.
This expansion will necessitate a demand for 9.1 million sq ft of real estate space, requiring a total investment of $4.8 billion in both the data centre infrastructure and real estate of the data centre sector, the report said.