Bangalore as a city is strategically located and has good interconnectivity. The city has already attracted about 10 data centre companies and currently features among the top five leading destinations for the data centre industry in India, with a current data centre capacity of around 100 MW, accounting for 15 per cent of the Indian data centre industry’s overall capacity.
According to JLL’s ‘H1 2021 India Data Center Market Update’, the acceleration of digitalisation has forced enterprises to scale up their IT infrastructure. As a result of digital upgrades, strong demand for colocation or cloud facilities, across India.
The State government is aiming to add another 200 MW by 2025 driven by its new policy rollout. This will certainly help ramp up capacity in the city in the coming years.
“Bangalore should step up further efforts to create demand and value for data centres by providing a robust and well-connected ecosystem for the growth of the industry, to take a lead in the sector in the country.
Particularly for CtrlS, Bangalore will remain a key growth market. Favourable regulatory support, rapidly growing cloud computing, increasing internet penetration, government effort in the digital economy, adoption of new technologies (IoT, 5G etc), and growing needs for hyper-scalers are some of the major factors driving the demand for data centres in the city,” said Royce Thomas, President and Chief Business Officer, CtrlS.
Power Requirements and availability
The data centre is a power-intensive industry and Karnataka ensures adequate power supply through conventional and renewable sources.
“The State ranks first in renewable energy with 15 GW installed capacity and 9 GW green energy capacity being under implementation,” added Thomas.
He further explained that the power expenses in the data centre industry typically account for 55-60 per cent of total costs for the maintenance of multiple cooling paths and redundancy. Given the ESG considerations for most of the key tenants, DC firms are expected to invest in green power to meet their power requirements.
Bangalore, the ‘Silicon Valley of India’ traditionally has been the most vibrant location for the IT industry and talent pool. The city has a vast talent pool to meet the growth requirements of the industry, thus attracting a lot of green-field and brown-field projects not only from Indian companies but also MNCs.
Incentives and support from the Government
“The data centre industry has constantly received the State government’s backing in Bangalore. To boost the growth prospects, the Karnataka government has approved a new policy in April with an aim to attract Rs 10,000 crore investments by 2025,” said Thomas.
He further pointed out that the Cabinet has decided to grant over Rs 100 crore towards the implementation of the new policy, offering a slew of incentives and subsidies, including power tariff concession, exemption from electricity duty and other special incentive packages on a case-to-case basis. This move will give an edge to the State to attract industry and talent in the future.
Earlier this year, CtrlS had announced the deployment of Asia’s largest Gas Insulated Substation (GIS) in Mumbai, which is uniquely poised to be a game-changer in the Indian data centre industry.
The state-of-the-art gas-insulated substation (GIS), is currently equipped with 300MW and can scale up to 700MW and is backed by three different sources and diversified paths ensuring 100 per cent availability of power at all times, thus powering the two million square feet CtrlS Datacenter Campus spread across 10 Data Centres.
The campus is currently under construction of which four rated-4 data centres are operational.
