India’s data centre capacity is projected to jump almost tenfold to 9.2 GW by 2030 from the current 960 MW, driven by AI-heavy compute demand and a rapidly digitising economy. The estimate comes from a new government whitepaper, “Democratising Access to AI Infrastructure”, released by the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser, which argues that India must quickly close the gap between its data generation and its relatively modest data centre footprint.
AI Demand Outpaces Current Infrastructure
The report notes that India hosts roughly 20% of the world’s data but only about 3% of global data centre capacity, highlighting the mismatch between data creation and compute availability. With over 900 million internet users and the world’s highest mobile data consumption, this imbalance risks constraining AI adoption and digital services unless infrastructure scales rapidly.
The whitepaper calls for data centres to be treated as strategic national infrastructure, central to both economic growth and digital sovereignty.
Rising Energy Needs and Cooling Market Expansion
Data centres today account for around 0.5% of India’s electricity consumption, a share the report says could rise to 3% by 2030 as new facilities and AI workloads come online. The data centre cooling market, valued at $2.1 billion in 2024, is expected to grow to $7.13 billion by 2030, reflecting the shift to more advanced thermal management as rack densities increase.
The paper urges adoption of energy-efficient cooling and hybrid power setups that blend renewables with conventional sources, aligning with International Energy Agency projections that global data centre electricity use will more than double by the end of the decade.
Building Sovereign AI and Data Platforms
Under the IndiaAI Mission, the government is setting up a cluster housing 3,000 next-generation GPUs for sovereign AI projects, in addition to 38,000 GPUs already procured and offered at subsidised rates to Indian firms building local-language models.
To address data quality and accessibility, MeitY has created AIKosh, a national repository of datasets, models and tools, which now hosts thousands of datasets and over 250 AI models, along with an AI sandbox for development and testing. Complementing this is Bhashini, an AI-powered translation platform that generates text and speech datasets in multiple Indian languages to ease the chronic shortage of digitised local-language and voice data.
Regional Hubs and Private Sector Momentum
The whitepaper emphasises public–private partnerships to expand AI infrastructure, with regional hubs planned in cities like Jaipur, Coimbatore and Chandigarh to decentralise compute and reduce latency.
Mumbai–Navi Mumbai currently leads with over a quarter of live capacity, followed by Chennai, while Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi NCR together account for a significant share of the rest.
Private players including Yotta Data Services, NTT, CtrlS, Airtel (with Google), Equinix, Reliance Industries and Microsoft are all ramping investments in new AI-ready data centres and gigawatt-scale, green-powered campuses, supported by forecasts such as Gartner’s projection that India’s data centre spending will grow more than 20% in 2026.
