NTT will launch six data centers in India over the next three months, with three more in the works. Nearly 70% of the new capacity in these data centers has already been booked, according to NTT India MD Sharad Sanghi.
The company will launch six additional data centers by the end of June, bringing its total number of operating data centers in the country to 11. These new data centers will be located in Airoli and Mahape in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai.
A $2.5 billion Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed in Davos with Maharashtra to construct data centers, subsea cables, and renewable energy plants in the state over the following five years. NTT has invested around $4.5 billion in India since 2020.
According to Abhijit Dubey, Global CEO of NTT, demand for cloud migration and services both in India and globally has been strong. Only 20% enterprise workloads have migrated to the cloud in India and globally. There’s a lot of headroom for growth. Companies are more multi-cloud today along with having their private clouds at the moment.
Dubey said that India is the second largest market for NTT in terms of employee base, including IT services and data center business, generating around $500 million in revenue for the company.
With a current workforce of approximately 37,000 employees, India’s employee base is second only to Japan, while NTT Group’s global employee count stands at 350,000.
“India has the highest growth rate in terms of demand for NTT’s offerings. It’s the eighth largest country by revenue as compared to the 70 countries NTT operates in,” said Dubey.
Investing More on Digital Infrastructures
Edge computing is one of the industries the company is heavily investing in outside of the cloud. NTT, who entered the edge computing market first, would invest in constructing edge data centers in India as well, said Dubey. Some of these edge data centers in India will come up in Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad, Nagpur and Lucknow.
In 2020, the company had announced a $2 billion investment to build data centers in India. The funding was intended to be utilized to construct six hyperscale data center parks, three of which would be in Mumbai and one each in Chennai, Noida, and Bangalore. In addition, the company planned to open data centers in Tier-II locations due to the rise in demand for data center services.
Moreover, the company has also planned to invest into building of other information and communications infrastructures such as submarine cable landing stations, solar parks, and cloud computing capacity in the next three to four years.
The company has just recently announced its plans to invest $3.5 billion on India’s digital infrastructure over the next seven years. The investments will mostly target digital infrastructure, and they will nearly increase the telco’s existing capacity to 300 MW.
