NEW DELHI : Inside Yotta’s data centre, part of the Hiranandani Group, the AI boom takes on a distinctly physical form.
From the outside, the data centre in Navi Mumbai could be mistaken for one of the Hiranandani Towers in Powai, with its familiar light sandstone facade. The resemblance, however, ends there. Inside, long rows of server racks stretch across the facility, their lights blinking as machines process data round the clock. Power, cooling and connectivity are not supporting actors here. They are the infrastructure that keeps the cloud running.
This cloud is not fluffy shapes in the sky. It lives inside the massive data centres Yotta has built, packed with servers, cables and cooling systems, all drawing electricity and producing heat around the clock.
India is now entering the race to build more of the physical scaffolding for the digital economy, as the US begins to confront the costs of its own data centre boom.
Across the US, more than 15 states have proposed curbs on data centre development over concerns about power demand, water use, and impacts on communities. New York has paused new large-scale projects for a year, while Texas is halting new grid connections as it reviews energy-use plans.
In June, voters in Monterey Park, California, permanently banned data centres, the first US city to do so. For India, these developments offer an early warning.
“India has an opportunity to learn from the US. The lesson is not to slow data centre development, but to assess the economic, social and environmental trade-offs upfront,” said Ashish Banerjee, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner. “Power and water availability, ratepayer protection, noise, local benefits and community acceptance should become part of site selection and approval.”
India’s data-centre capacity crossed 2.1 GW at the end of the June quarter, according to data from S&P Global and CBRE. Around 200 MW was added in the first six months of the year, and an additional 500 MW is expected to be added through the rest of 2026. Amazon, Microsoft and Google have committed nearly $57 billion in less than a year towards AI, cloud and data-centre infrastructure in India.
The opportunity is considerable. India generates nearly 20 percent of the world’s data but hosts only about 3 percent of global data-centre capacity. But building enough infrastructure to close that gap will require more than just capital.
It will require electricity, land, connectivity and increasingly, access to resources that are already under pressure in some parts of the country. The question is whether India can build the data-centre infrastructure required for its AI ambitions without running into the power, resource and community conflicts now emerging in the US.
Search for power
The scale of the global expansion is changing the economics of where data centres can be built.
S&P Global expects US data-centre capacity to rise from 62 GW in March to 152 GW by 2030. China had around 34 GW of capacity in early 2026.
India’s capacity is smaller, but its growth is accelerating. Hyperscalers account for roughly half of current data-centre occupier activity in India, according to CBRE. In the March quarter alone, hyperscalers contracted more than 300 MW of capacity.
“As AI workloads become increasingly compute-intensive, developers need assurance that a location can provide reliable electricity today and sufficient capacity for future expansion. Power availability has become one of the most important determinants of long-term competitiveness,” said Anshuman Magazine, Chairman and chief executive of India, Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa, CBRE.
India has one advantage that many markets don’t. It has an integrated national power network at a massive scale. The ‘One Nation, One Grid’ mechanism allows power generated in one part of the country to be used elsewhere. As one industry expert put it, power generated in Rajasthan can be used in Tamil Nadu. That flexibility matters because a data centre cannot simply be switched off when electricity becomes scarce.
The same logic applies to connectivity.
Why Mumbai became the hub
For now, that combination of power, connectivity and customer demand has made Mumbai the country’s most important data-centre market.
Mumbai, including Navi Mumbai, accounts for about 44 percent of India’s data-centre capacity, according to S&P Global. Noida follows with 20 percent, Chennai with 10 percent, Hyderabad with 9 percent, Pune with 8 percent and Bengaluru with 6 percent.
Mumbai has the country’s highest concentration of subsea cable networks and landing stations and handles about 95 percent of India’s international subsea cable traffic, making it a natural hub for data centres.
“Geographically, India sits within 100 milliseconds of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, making it an ideal regional digital hub,” said Sunil Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of Yotta Data Services.
WHERE INDIA’S DATA CENTRES ARE LOCATED
India had 21.8 lakh kW of net UPS power across data centres in Q2 2026, with Mumbai and Pune together accounting for nearly 50% of the total.
