Blackstone is all set to expand its digital infrastructure footprint across India, with plans to invest a whopping Rs 10,000 crores into developing a hyperscale data center campus in Chennai in partnership with Beary Group. The campus will initially feature an IT load capacity of 216 MW.
For this, Blackstone’s data center platform, Lumina CloudInfra has acquired the 16 acre plot of land in Ambattur, Chennai’s fast-growing digital infrastructure hub for Rs 500 crores.
Confirming the news to w.media, Syed Mohamed Beary, Founder & CMD, Beary Group, said, “Having delivered eight data centers with 285 MW of power, 365 under construction, we are extremely pleased to partner with Blackstone (Lumina Cloudinfra) on this large data centre development in Ambattur, Chennai.”
Beary further said that the project “underscores India’s growing digital and data driven economy,” and that its “Design-Build-Deliver model enables global investors to achieve speed, quality and sustainability at scale”.
Blackstone’s current portfolio in India comprises projects in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, and Hyderabad. Readers would recall that in September last year, we had reported that Lumina CloudInfra had acquired two adjacent land parcels in Mumbai’s Chandivali area to build two data centers of 30 MW each.
At last year’s World Economic Forum, Blackstone had signed two separate agreements with authorities in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. The first was a US$ 3 billion Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC), and the second is also a MoU worth US$ 3 billion with the City & Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (CIDCO) to develop data centers in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR).
Blackstone has been present in India since 2005, and has been making huge investments in real estate, dabbling in office spaces and logistics. Blackstone also plans to invest US$ 5 billion into Mumbai 3.0. This is a sister city project that the Maharashtra government has planned to decongest Mumbai, much like what it had done when it developed Navi Mumbai in the 1980s. Mumbai 3.0 will span Karnala-Sai-Chirner New Town (KSC New Town) and will see development of new infrastructure, residential, and commercial spaces.