MAA10, the first data centre project between Digital Realty, Brookfield, and Reliance Industries (Photo: Digital Realty)
A joint venture of Digital Realty, Brookfield Asset Management and India’s Reliance Industries has unveiled its inaugural data centre project in India to tap growing demand for digital infrastructure in the world’s most populous nation.
Austin-based Digital Realty, which bills itself as the world’s largest provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data centre, co-location and interconnection solutions, announced Friday the launch of MAA10, the first phase of a 10-acre (4-hectare), 100-megawatt campus in northwestern Chennai’s Ambattur neighbourhood.
The project was developed by Digital Connexion, a three-way joint venture of Digital Realty, the infrastructure arm of Canadian investment giant Brookfield and Jio Platforms, the telecom unit of India’s largest conglomerate, Reliance Industries.
“With a population of 1.4 billion and a growing focus on the delivery of digital services, India represents a key market opportunity for Digital Realty and our partners and customers,” said Serene Nah, head of Asia Pacific at Digital Realty. “We believe MAA10’s next-generation data centre infrastructure and Digital Realty’s connected global open data centre platform provide the foundational pillars our customers need to innovate and tap into this thriving market.”
The project comes amid heightened investor interest in Indian data centre projects, with total stock and capacity in the South Asian nation projected to double over the next three years to 23 million square feet (2.1 million square metres) and 1,800MW respectively, driven by strong growth in data consumption and cloud adoption, according to forecasts by consultancy Colliers.
Racks Ready for More Kilowatts
Originally formed in 2021 as a 50:50 joint venture of Digital Realty and Brookfield to develop, own and operate data centres in India, the venture then known as BAM Digital Realty added Reliance as a third partner in July, with each of the partners now owning a third of what it now known as Digital Connexion.
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The six-storey, 196,000 square foot facility has 20MW of capacity and can accommodate interconnectivity demands of AI workloads, offering standardised and bespoke configurations to meet high-density power requirements of up to 70kW per rack.
“This 100MW campus in Ambattur is ideal, given the availability of the necessary power supply, high number of submarine cable landing stations in the local area, and the state government’s aspirations to make Chennai the top data centre destination in India,” said CB Velayuthan, chief executive of Digital Connexion. “We look forward to making this campus a destination of choice for customers, partners, cloud and service providers looking to expand their reach in India, starting with MAA10, the state-of-the-art first phase of this highly scalable campus.”
The facility, which broke ground in February 2023, features a modular design, enabling customers to scale infrastructure across single-cabinet to multi-megawatt workload requirements, as well as N+2 cooling systems.
The campus was also designed to maximise energy and water efficiency and will utilise the building’s on-site rooftop solar panels as an energy source.
The project is part of what Digital Realty described as its “strategy to provide state-of-the-art and highly connected digital infrastructure to address customers’ diverse requirements and help them navigate new technologies and the business and regulatory challenges associated with digital transformation initiatives in India”.
MAA10 is the first Indian asset within Digital Realty’s PlatformDIGITAL global portfolio, which has a footprint of over 300 facilities in more than 35 countries. The US-listed data centre trust has 15 other locations in Asia Pacific across Japan, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and South Korea.
India Server Sheds in Style
The Chennai opening comes after Digital Connexion in June last year announced its acquisition of a 2.15 acre plot in Mumbai’s Chandivali area for development of a 40MW data centre.
Controlled by Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, Reliance had reportedly invested INR 378 crore ($45 million) to join Brookfield and Digital Realty in the venture, with the foreign partners aiming to tap the infrastructure of the Indian firm’s Jio mobile network unit, which is India’s largest cell carrier by subscribers.
Also this month, NTT Ltd launched its second data centre campus in Noida, southeast of Delhi, with the 22.4MW facility marking its second in the city in India’s National Capital Region.
That project followed Singaporean property giant CapitaLand Investment’s announcement of a plan to invest INR 45 billion ($540 million) in business parks, logistics and data centre developments in Chennai over the next five years.
In September, the investment manager opened the first phase of a business park redevelopment project in Hyderabad with the construction of a 40MW data centre on the same site.
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