2 weeks Ago By Ivor Soans
Around the turn of the century, I visited what was likely India’s first data centre. 1998, if my memory serves right. Sharad Sanghi, who is now a legend in the Indian techverse (and rightly so), had just set up Netmagic after having helped VSNL launch Internet services in India.
Netmagic had built a data centre in Nirlon at Goregaon in Mumbai. Focused as he was on excellence and top-notch services, the data centre was state-of-the-art then, though many wondered whether the business had any future in India.A few years ago, I visited Netmagic’s large campus near Powai (the company is now a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT Communications), and while it was clear by then that Sharad’s carefully laid plans had paid off and the naysayers had egg on their faces, the scale of the data centre campus was equally stunning, besides the technological capabilities on offer.
It seemed like there were many generations between the first Netmagic data centre and the one I was visiting and indeed, in 20+ years, cloud computing and SaaS have come of age as they power businesses. The march of technology is like that of a juggernaut and the data centre space is no exception.The latest driver for data centres is AI.
AI workloads are hungry for compute and storage capacity and while the race is on between nations to build better and better AI models, the race perhaps unseen is the one to build sufficient data centre capacity to support the massive acceleration in the use of AI that we are witnessing. Blackstone recently announced it was investing $11 billion in new data centres in India. The industry has grown massively, recording a 139% increase in capacity by scaling from 590 MW in 2019 to 1.
4 GW in 2024. And it still may not be enough. For instance, despite the data centre boom in the US, there could still be a data centre supply deficit of more than 15 GW by 2030.
Do note that India’s total capacity now is around a tenth of that deficit. And while data centres don’t employ as many people as a regular office building, let’s not ignore new jobs being created in construction, data centre management, telecom and more as a result of this data centre boom. No AI job loss naysayer can ignore this.
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