Cushman & Wakefield, a global commercial real estate services firm that also produces periodic reports on the data center construction, has come out with its latest report that says that the Indian data center market capacity has finally gone past the 1GW mark.
The report titled Asia Pacific Data Center Update H2 2023 says, “In H2 2023, India joined Mainland China, Japan and Australia as >1 GW-sized markets and we anticipate that Singapore will reach this status sometime in 2024 with 962 MW currently live.”
It further says, “More than 50% of under-construction activity regionally is concentrated in Mainland China and India. However, with a development pipeline of 2.9 GW & 1.7 GW of combined under construction and planned activity in India and Japan respectively, we will see these markets on track to rival Mainland China as the only three markets in Asia Pacific to grow larger than 3 GW over the next 5 years.”
When it comes to regional markets within India, the report finds that “Mumbai remains as the data centre capital of India, taking over 50 per cent of the nation’s operational capacity and close to 50 percent of India’s total development pipeline of under construction and planned activity.”
The report further finds that “In H2 2023, 75MW of operational capacity was added to the market with announcements from existing operators as well as new entrants, such as Colt DC, and more than 300MW under construction and planned. As a result, the vacancy rate of 19% reported in our H1 2023 update has increased to 28%. However, we anticipate that this will drop throughout the year due to increasing demand from enterprises and the government.”
It predicts, “Mumbai is expected to see a further 212MW go live in 2024, with Sify, NTT and CtrlS cumulatively taking up almost half of this upcoming IT load and announcing large investments centre market. Some of the new entrants in Mumbai including Colt, AdaniConnex, & DigitalEdge have plans to build large data centre campuses in Mumbai, cumulatively adding ~700MW of capacity when fully built.”
The report dubs Mumbai as a “powerhouse market” and says, “Since our latest H1 2023 update, Mumbai overtook Beijing as the largest powerhouse market in Asia Pacific. Although its current live capacity is not as high as Beijing, Tokyo, Shanghai and Sydney, markets that have also retained their powerhouse status in H2 2023, a substantial development pipeline of almost 1.5GW and reports of extensive land banked sites in Mumbai show the potential for this fast-growing market to become a 3GW+ data centre epicentre in the coming years whilst the other four are looking to become >2GW-sized markets upon the full development of their existing pipeline.”
Among the major data center developments in and around Mumbai, the report points to the US$ 6 Billion expansion plans of AdaniConnex based on the Adani Groups recently signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Maharashtra government. It also points to Equinix’s upcoming fourth facility in Mumbai and Amazon’s upcoming data center development projects for which it has acquired land parcels in Powai and Thane.