In June this year, the Uttar Pradesh government approved a plan to set up four data centres in the state at a cost of Rs 15,950 crore which it said would create 4,000 direct or indirect jobs. The state’s data centre policy offers various incentives like capital subsidy, interest subvention, stamp duty exemption, and various other non-financial incentives apart from energy-related financial incentives.
According to the statement released by the government, it also approved non-financial incentives to NIDP Developers Private Limited and financial and non-financial incentives to three investors, Adani Enterprises Limited, NTT Global Data Centers, and Cloud Infrastructure India Private Limited. These firms are in the process of setting up data centres in the state.
Greater Noida’s leap in data centres
Greater Noida is all set to attract an investment of around Rs 8000 crore dedicated to data centres, with Rs 7,000 crore coming from Hiranandani Group’s Yotta Infrastructure and Rs 1,000 crore from Japan’s NTT Global. The Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority (GNIDA) has leased 20 acres of land in Knowledge Park V to Mumbai-based NIDP Developers for setting up a data centre park. A senior GNIDA official said that the cost of land is Rs 116 crore and the yearly lease is Rs 2.92 crore. He added that as per the state government’s policy, NIDP got a waiver in stamp duty on the condition that it will complete 40 percent of the project in three years and the remaining 60 percent in another three. If it fails to deliver on time, it will have to pay the stamp duty along with 18 percent interest, he said.
Read More: India's data centre industry to double to 1,008 MW by 2023: JLL
NIDP Developers’ plan
Yotta Infrastructure is working to set up a data centre on the land leased by NIDP. Both are parts of the Hiranandani Group of Companies.
Darshan Hiranandani, chairman of Yotta Infrastructure, said that the first data centre building—Yotta D1—will be spread across 300,000 sq. ft.
“The total investment in Yotta Data Centre Park is around Rs 7,000 crore. Yotta D1 has a 5,000-server rack capacity. Yotta D1 is part of an extensive integrated data centre park with six buildings (multi-tenanted or single tenanted) with a total capacity of 30,000 racks. The data centre park will have power generation and distribution infrastructure as well as three redundant fibre pathways for connectivity,” said Hiranandani.
Hiranandani added that Yotta is looking to capture a good chunk of the market share in the national capital region.
“We already have an anchor customer at Yotta D1. Besides, there will be enterprises and businesses of all sizes across domains that will be hosted at Yotta D1. Being the first large-scale data centre in the Greater Noida region, we expect to capture more than 40 percent of NCR market share from our colocation and other managed hosting services,” he said.
Other firms also line up
According to GNIDA, NTT Global Data Centers has also sub-leased 4 acres of land in Tech Zone 4. NTT would be investing around Rs 1,000 crore to set up a 70 MW data centre with captive power of 70 MW in the city.
As per various media reports, Noida is also attracting a good amount of investment for data centres. The Adani Group is said to be planning an investment of Rs 5,000-6,000 crore to set up two data centres in Noida’s Sector 80 and Sector 62. Other proposed investments include Rs 2,700 crore from Sify Technologies and Rs 197 crore from the Web Werks-Iron Mountain Data Centers joint venture.
Read More: Yotta to begin work on 2 more data centres in Greater Noida in January
Yotta’s India expansion plan
Yotta is thinking beyond the NCR region. Hiranandani said the company plans to capture 25 percent of the data centre market in India.
“We are building things at a high scale, high quality, lower costs and with a service range meeting requirements of multiple types of customers and so we are bullish on our revenues. We expect to have a market share of 25 percent in colocation and managed hosting service space by 2030,” said Hiranandani.
He added that Yotta’s first data centre building Yotta NM1 is already operational at Navi Mumbai, which is India’s only Uptime Institute-certified Tier IV data centre and the world’s second-largest data centre.
“The operational Navi Mumbai data centre is spread across 3 million sq. ft, followed by Noida to go live in FY22 at around 2 million sq. ft. Development in other markets like Kolkata, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai and Gujarat will attract the balance of the calculated investments. The horizon of expansion plans range across five years and the investment allocated to dedicated projects stands around minimum Rs 1,000 crore each year. We are also coming up with edge data centers (smaller units located closer to end users). In Phase I, between 2022 and 2024, we will set up 13 edge data centres. A total of 56 edge data centres will be set up by 2027,” said Hiranandani.
The Yotta chairman also said that India is at an inflection point in terms of becoming a truly digital economy and that will boost the demand for data centres. “The business of data centres is set to see an exponential growth on the back of multitude factors like data explosion, last-mile internet penetration, UPI transactions, booming e-commerce industry, cloud adoption, digitisation, smart automation, rise of AI/ML, IOT, big data and data analytics, 5G network, etc. Data migration to Indian cloud computing servers in the wake of data localisation directives will garner robust demand for data centres,” he said.
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