Bharti Airtel plans to step up investments in its data center subsidiary, Nxtra, as it targets a bigger share of India’s rapidly growing digital infrastructure market. The company said it will allocate additional capital to acquire land in key locations and expand capacity, while also building a major data center for Google in Visakhapatnam.
At the same time, Airtel described Indus Towers as a strategic yet undervalued, dividend-generating asset, and said it plans to acquire up to an additional 5% stake in the tower company.
“We’ve been investing about Rs 1,500 crore a year in Nxtra. We see a lot of opportunity to build out greater capacities in the data center space,” said Gopal Vittal, Bharti Airtel’s managing director and CEO (India & South Asia), during the company’s Q2 FY25 earnings call. “We will allocate more capital to buy land in the right places and continue to invest in the partnership with Google in Visakhapatnam.”
As part of its deal with Google, Airtel will build data centers in Visakhapatnam, provide terrestrial connectivity linking the coastal city to Delhi and Mumbai, and set up a cable landing station—a comprehensive infrastructure package combining connectivity, data storage, and network integration.
“The data center build-out will happen through Nxtra, because that’s the business Nxtra does. The connectivity and cable landing station will be handled by Bharti Airtel within Airtel Business. So it’s a composite deal,” Vittal explained.
The partnership is part of Google’s broader investment in Indian digital infrastructure, with Airtel being one of two partners selected to execute parts of the 1-gigawatt data center build-out. “We are doing a part of the build-out; there is another partner handling another portion. We’re still working out the investment details, but we’ll do whatever it takes to stay competitive,” Vittal said. “Whatever is required to be invested, we will make the investment.”
Nxtra currently commands a 10–12% market share in India’s data center segment, but Airtel believes there is significant headroom for growth. “We are not satisfied with our current share. Given the pace at which the data center market is expanding in India, we believe we need to step up our market presence—and we’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen,” Vittal said.
Beyond data centers, Airtel is also seeing strong traction for its cloud business under Xtelify , with over 70 enterprise conversations underway and six deals already signed across manufacturing, BFSI, and distribution sectors. The company is also in discussions with several public sector units for cloud partnerships.
“One of the key advantages of Airtel Cloud is true sovereignty,” Vittal said. “The control plane and operational management reside in India, and the platform is governed entirely by Indian laws. This gives enterprises and public sector clients complete confidence over their data.”
Vittal dismissed analyst speculation about a possible merger of Nxtra with Indus Towers, clarifying that the two businesses operate in completely different domains. He said Indus is a passive tower infrastructure company, while Nxtra focuses on enterprise data centers and cloud partnerships. “There is absolutely no intention of folding Nxtra into Indus or anything of that sort,” he emphasized.
In a regulatory filing issued on Monday alongside its September quarter results, Bharti Airtel said that a special committee of directors, authorised by the board, has granted an enabling approval to acquire up to an additional 5% stake in Indus Towers over time. The company clarified that the stake purchase could be executed in one or more tranches.
“...we obviously see it as a strategic asset, but we also see it as a highly undervalued asset. The fact is that it is undervalued. I mean, multiples of tower companies around the world tend to be much higher than what they are in Indus. So, we see it as an undervalued asset. We see it as a strong dividend-paying asset, and we think that it makes a lot of sense to allocate some capital to take it up by 5%,” he said.
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