BAM Digital to set up 2nd data centre in Mumbai

BAM Digital Realty, a joint venture between Digital Realty and Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, is set to build a data centre campus in Mumbai, property registration records showed.

The data centre, the second from BAM Digital Realty, will come up on a 2.15-acre plot in Chandivali in the western suburbs. The company may invest ₹2,000-2,500 crore to create a campus designed for 35-40 megawatts (MW) of energy, three people aware of its plans said. “As a thumb rule, around $6-7 million of investment is needed to build each megawatt. So, the company is likely to invest ₹2,500 crore to build this centre,” one of the three people cited above said on condition of anonymity.

Earlier this year, BAM Digital Realty announced its first facility in Chennai, designed for a maximum capacity of 100MW upon full buildout. The first phase, MAA10, will offer 20MW critical capacity to support the demand for digital infrastructure in India, the company had said then.

BAM Digital Realty plans to buy plots in several metros for data centre campuses to support global hyper-scale service providers as well as international and local enterprises.

BAM Digital Realty is a global data centre platform that supports the data, control, and networking demands of global enterprises. It helps customers scale digital transformation by deploying critical infrastructure. Brookfield Infrastructure is the infrastructure investment arm of Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management, which manages over $600 billion of assets globally, including about $24 billion in India across infrastructure, renewables, real estate, and private equity. y

Digital Realty is a provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data centre, co-location, and interconnection solutions.

Spokespeople for Brookfield India and BAM Digital Realty declined to comment.

“With a population of over 1.4 billion, the world’s fifth-largest economy in terms of GDP (gross domestic product) and an expanding focus on the digital delivery of services, India represents a key market opportunity to extend coverage, capacity, and connectivity options for the world’s leading service providers as well as local and global enterprise customers. India is a high-growth market, with data centre demand expected to significantly increase, driven by rapidly growing data consumption, digitization of the economy, onset of 5G, and data localization trends,” the two companies had said in a joint statement in 2022.

BAM Digital Realty competes with global giants such as NTT Corp, Google Llc, Microsoft Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., as well as domestic businesses such as Adani Group and Larsen & Toubro Ltd, which are keen on the data centre business. These firms have plans to create fresh data centres in India or increase the capacity of existing data centres.

An Icra Ratings report earlier this year said with companies pouring in billions of dollars to set up these power-guzzling infrastructure components, about 4,900-5,000MW of data centre capacity is expected to be added in the next six years, requiring investments of nearly ₹1.5 trillion.

Another research by Anarock-Binswanger estimated that 45 new data centres, covering 13 million sq ft and 1,015 MW of capacity, are expected to be added by 2025 to India’s current count of 138 data centres, signalling huge investment opportunities in the segment.

Updated: 11 Jun 2023, 11:25 PM IST