Golden Gigawatt Opportunity – Data centers in India

India is firmly on the journey ahead for digital transformation. With a population of over 1.3 billion people, the country’s Internet penetration as well as smartphone access has grown tremendously in the last decade. It is the second largest market globally with 578 million mobile phone (wireless) data users, consuming 46,440 million GB of data. 5G technology will enable 4x growth in mobile data traffic by 2024. The number of social media users in India stood at 326 million in 2018. Further more, 660 million Indians use digital payments and the country will contribute 2.2% to the worlds digital payment market. The most heartening feature of India’s data consumption growth is the fact that the rural and semi-urban areas have adopted digital technology in a big way.

With the proliferation of Internet access and the rapid growth of digital services in areas like retail, banking, insurance, telecom, healthcare, media, entertainment and governance, data centers have become the enablers of this growth. As per estimates, the Indian data center infrastructure market is set to become the second largest in the Asia-Pacific region by end of 2020.

There are stringent data localization rules, which make it mandatory for even global brands to store their Indian data within the country’s geographic boundaries. The country is witnessing a tremendous growth in online banking and Non-Banking Financial Companies sector, which is also fueling the demand for local data centers. Another factor driving the data center growth in India is the growing cloud adoption in the country.

The Digital India and Make in India initiatives of the government have also created a highly conducive ecosystem for tech-enabled start-ups. The period from 2016 to 2018 itself saw 14,600 start-ups enter the Indian markets. With AI, cloud and IoT technologies forming the core of such tech-innovators, the data storage demand in the country is only bound to increase. Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi NCR together account for 67% of capacity share based on IT design power load (MW). Mumbai-headquartered data center operator Web Werks plans to expand operations in India significantly to keep pace with the increase in local demand.

Web Werks hyperscale data centers are operational in three major business hubs in India. The goal of scaling is to continue building a robust system, where that system revolves around the cloud, big data, or distributed storage, or a combination of all three Ð supported by extensive network of ISPs.