India’s operational data-centre capacity increased from approximately 375 megawatts in 2020 to nearly 1.8 gigawatts in the first half of 2026, driven by cloud adoption, data-intensive consumer services and accelerating demand for artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Capacity could reach between 6 and 8 gigawatts by 2030 and 12 to 14 gigawatts by 2035.
The buildout is being led by a combination of global hyperscalers, specialist data-centre operators and domestic infrastructure groups. Amazon Web Services is expanding across Mumbai and Hyderabad, while Google’s planned Visakhapatnam investment would establish its first fully owned and operated data-centre facility in India. Google’s existing Indian cloud regions operate with domestic partners.
Local operators are also widening the geographical footprint of the sector. CtrlS Datacenters operates 18 facilities across nine markets and is developing additional capacity in Mumbai and Hyderabad. It has inaugurated a ₹400-crore facility in Patna and announced plans for a ₹10,000-crore, 150-megawatt AI data centre in Bodh Gaya.
CapitaLand India Trust has committed more than ₹5,000 crore to data-centre developments in Navi Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai, with combined planned power capacity of approximately 200 megawatts. Equinix has invested more than $365 million in India and operates five facilities across Mumbai and Chennai.
The density of AI infrastructure materially changes facility requirements. Conventional enterprise racks commonly operate at much lower power levels, while GPU systems used for training large models can require 100 to 250 kilowatts per rack. That raises demands on substations, cooling, backup generation and the regional power grid.
Indian banks, insurers, ecommerce platforms, hospital groups, government agencies and startups are expanding their use of locally hosted compute. Workloads include fraud detection, conversational systems, medical-image analysis, research, forecasting and AI-assisted customer operations. Demand is therefore being generated by domestic deployments alongside capacity intended to support international customers.
Data centres have received infrastructure status, which improves access to long-term institutional finance. The Union Budget for 2026-27 also introduced a tax holiday extending to 2047 for eligible foreign cloud providers using notified Indian data-centre infrastructure to serve overseas customers.
The sector faces land, energy, water and specialist-workforce requirements alongside its growth projections. High-density facilities require reliable power procurement and must manage cooling without creating unsustainable pressure on local water systems. The government has estimated that the expansion could create nearly 100,000 specialised engineering positions.
The next phase of construction will determine whether India primarily hosts applications and data or develops a wider domestic compute layer capable of supporting model training, inference, research and AI product development at scale.
