UPDATE Ashish Arora, CEO of Nxtra by Airtel, the Bharti Airtel data center operating unit, continues his discussion with Inside Towers on the rapid data center growth in India and how Nxtra is responding. Green energy investments are significant and unique to India, scaling up to 400 MW capacity by 2030. The entire capacity of the Indian data center industry is expected to be around 2.5 GW from 650 MW today. Indian government policies favor green energy use in data centers. “We are allowed to use green energy to the maximum extent possible in almost all the states,” says Arora.
Nxtra has been investing in green energy separately for these data centers. Arora points out, “We have investments in 10 green energy companies with captive infrastructure for providing green energy to our data centers. We currently are 50 percent green and will reach almost 80 percent by the end of this year. We make sure every new facility we bring up will be green from day one and we’re making large investments around it. We have an ambition to reach net zero by 2031.”
Nxtra uses a combination of solar during the day and wind at night to effectively carry the site load for 24 hours. It is investing in hydrogen, as well, and expects hydrogen will become abundant and cheap in the next decade or so. “We made an innovative investment last year in a fuel cell-based green energy plan for a data center in Bangalore.”
AI is having a similar impact in India as it is in the rest of the world. Since ChatGPT was launched in November, India has been at the forefront of AI technology adoption. As a whole, Arora suggests the Indian population is very tech savvy and will likely adopt AI in a big way. That will drive the need for more agile data center infrastructure. Estimates are that AI will consume 5x or more computing power than current applications require.
“We hear from hyperscalers that they are putting their AI plans in place. They are obviously looking at what capacities they can acquire in the short term,” says Arora. “In the next couple of quarters, things will become clearer. As we are hearing all around the world, AI will drive a very large part of the incremental consumption going forward in cloud and data center sites. The new Nxtra hyperscale data centers are ready to support high density AI loads and next-gen cooling technologies.”
Nxtra’s edge data centers typically are around 3-5 MW and 2-3 MW in smaller Tier 2/3 tier cities and towns. With Airtel’s wireless footprint that spans India, Nxtra can extend its big edge data center footprint as well. Arora says they are seeing data demand in every small part of the country.
Content delivery players are already colocating in Nxtra’s facilities, expanding the peering beyond top metros into smaller cities. 5G will drive a new set of applications largely in the B2B space which needs very low latency and a very localized cloud. These applications will start leveraging both latency of the 5G service as well as local edge cloud presence.
“As a company, we have the strength of being able to deliver 5G services across the country and we already have edge data centers in 120 locations so we can easily serve this kind of demand,” Arora says. “We are partnering with a lot of companies who are working on various use cases and applications to leverage the combination of edge cloud and 5G low latency.
Arora offered a closing thought, “We have a unique combination of a telco and a data center capability coming within a large organization with a very trusted brand and a long legacy. We have strong core capabilities around data center build and operations and a strong track record for executing on-time delivery of large built-to-suit DCs with high uptime. All of this is working very well for us in the Indian market.”
By John Celentano, Inside Towers Business Editor
Reader Interactions