Princeton Digital Group (PDG), a provider of data center services, wants the approval formalities to be simplified after recently announcing an investment of Rs. 2,500 crores in the construction of data centers in India.
In a chat with businessline, Vipin Shirsat, PDG’s General Manager, said there is an increasing need for data centers in India, thus it would be quite beneficial if the government made the clearance procedures easier to get. In this regard, he mentioned that the Center is developing a data center policy, for which there have been several rounds of industry consultation.
The policies of the corresponding State governments currently govern the Indian data center industry. Shirsat claimed that Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra are developing their own laws, while Uttar Pradesh has a “very progressive policy.”
With a combined current operating capacity of 650 MW, India is home to a number of businesses like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Azure (of Microsoft), Digital Ocean, and Domain Racer. (The industry switched to measuring capacity in terms of power consumption from the previous methods of evaluating data center capacity, which were the size of the real estate, in square meters or feet, and then the number of server racks, respectively.)
India’s requirement for data centers creates an investment potential of around $4.9 billion by 2025, according to the Ministry of Electronics and IT’s (Meity) 2020 Draft Data Center Policy. The draft strategy (then) said that India’s 375 MW of data center capacity “may rise three times by 2025,” although the country’s data center capacity has already doubled in the two years since it was published.
The proposed strategy mentioned creating “data center economic zones,” making it easier to do business, and fostering a supportive environment for data centers.
PDG’s customers
Building data centers with a 48 MW capacity in Mumbai in two equally spaced phases is being done by Princeton Digital Group, which has incorporated a company in India. According to Shirsat, 4 MW of the capacity is currently operational, and another 10 MW will be in a few months. Regarding clients, he stated that discussions were ongoing with some for a capacity of 10 MW but added that obtaining customers was not a challenge because of the digitalization of the Indian economy.
A prospective client of PDG is any business that might not have room on its own property or might not want to invest in on-premises infrastructure for its server banks. “Enterprise customers” are those. However, “hyperscale” or larger, clients include financial institutions and online retailers.
PDG is also considering building data centers in Pune, Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad at the same time. These would fall outside of the $300 million investment package. In response to a question, Shirsat stated that the industry’s margins were in the range of 30-35 percent.
