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The company estimates that the Indian data centre market is going to exceed $8.5 billion by 2023 and Mantra Data Centres (MDC) wants to secure the lion’s share
Yesterday, MDC announced that it would design, build and operate new data centre facilities in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata as part of a $1 billion expansion in their home market of India.
The company says the move is motivated by the rapid growth of the Indian data centre market, which is being fuelled by the country’s increasing internet penetration, government digitalisation programmes, and the widespread adoption of the cloud and IoT.
According to data from Headwind Consultants, global investment in data centres in the first half of 2021 has reached around $100 billion, with India the most rapidly growing market after the US. MDC themselves estimate the Indian data centre market will reach around $8.5 billion by 2023, with third-party data centres increasing their share from roughly 45% in 2018 to approximately 62% in 2023.
“MDC is very well positioned for success in this growing market, with a strong management team, green sourced energy, 1st in class stakeholders, on-time delivery and the right locations to create a network of Tier III & IV Data Centers across India,” said Jaan M. Chainani, Co-Founder & Managing Director of MDC. “Our aim is to help our customers grow seamlessly in the midst of the digitalisation of India.”
With the demand for cloud computing increasing so rapidly around the world, it should come as no surprise that we have seen a flurry of major data centre manoeuvres in recent months. Back in June, for example, Microsoft announced that it was planning four additional Chinese data centres by early 2022, in anticipation of the rocketing demand for capacity.
For communications service providers themselves, much like mobile towers and other infrastructure, data centres are increasingly becoming monetised in favour of the quick cash to invest elsewhere in their networks. Earlier this month, Hong Kong-based PCCW did just that, offloading their data centre assets to DigitalBridge for $750 million.
Selling these assets is not the only route to monetisation, however. Telstra, in Australia, has chosen to transform two of its data centres into carrier-neutral colocation facilities, available for hire by third parties. If this strategy proves successful, the operator suggests that they could transform more of their data centres in the future.
But perhaps the most intriguing news in this space (if you’ll pardon the pun) actually comes from Japan, where NTT is set to explore the potential of launching satellite data centres. This will allow more data from communications satellites to be processed in space, thus reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted back to Earth, significantly speeding up the data exchange. NTT hope to launch the first of these satellites in 2025, beginning commercial operations the following year.
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