Ambani’s Reliance joins Brookfield and Digital Realty for $11B India data center

Digital Connexion, a joint venture between Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management, and US-headquartered Digital Realty Trust, has committed to invest $11 billion by 2030 to develop artificial intelligence-native data centers in southern India.

The firm signed a memorandum of understanding with the Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board to construct a massive 1-gigawatt (GW) campus spanning 400 acres in Visakhapatnam. 

The facility will be designed specifically for AI workloads, helping to provide the infrastructure that supports the global surge in demand for computing infrastructure capable of supporting machine learning and generative AI applications.

The announcement and the size of the investment position Digital Connexion as a major player in India’s data center rush. The joint venture already operates a campus in Chennai and is developing a 40-megawatt (MW) facility in Mumbai, but the Visakhapatnam project represents a significant scaling of ambitions.

Tech giants converge on India

The investment joins the increasing list of companies, both international and local technology, pouring capital into India, betting that the world’s most populous nation will become a critical node in the global AI infrastructure network. 

Alphabet’s Google unveiled plans in October to invest approximately $15 billion over five years to build an AI hub in Andhra Pradesh.

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is also pursuing plans to build a 1 GW data center in India, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) secured $1 billion for HyperVault, its AI data center business, from TPG, a private equity group. Amazon has also earmarked $12.7 billion for cloud infrastructure development by 2030.

According to CBRE Group, total investments in India’s data center market are projected to exceed $100 billion by 2027, driven by the country’s competitive advantages, including development costs, second only to China and electricity rates far below those in the United States, United Kingdom, or Japan.

Energy demands and environmental pressures

However, the data center expansion is colliding with India’s chronic infrastructure challenges, especially with respect to its water and energy resources. The country accounts for over 17% of the global population, making it the most populous nation in the world; however, it only controls 4% of the world’s freshwater resources, according to World Bank data.

Data centers are known for their high demand for water, and the consumption by the ones situated in India is projected to rise from 150 billion liters in 2025 to 358 billion liters by 2030, increasing pressure on already strained supplies.

Data centers consume electricity equivalent to powering mid-size cities, and analysts say that investments in power by both public and private stakeholders have to be made to generate more power and support existing electrical grids globally. 

Supporting expanding data center capacity will require approximately $720 billion in investment by 2030. Goldman Sachs Research projects that worldwide data center capacity will reach roughly 122 GW by 2030, up from current levels.

Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu of Andhra Pradesh said that the wave of data center investments will position the state as a global technology hub and also create thousands of jobs in construction, engineering, and digital services. The state has secured 5.5 GW of data center projects to date and aims to expand green energy output to power the facilities.