Asia-Pacific real asset manager ESR Group has entered India’s data centre market with an investment of Rs nine billion (Rs 9 bn) to develop a hyperscale facility in the Rabale area of Navi Mumbai. The project marks the company’s first data centre development in the country and signals growing investor confidence in India’s digital infrastructure sector. The commitment reflects a strategic bet on long-term demand for compute and storage capacity across enterprise and cloud segments.

The facility is planned as a multi-storey, high-capacity centre intended to meet rapidly rising needs for cloud services, artificial intelligence workloads and enterprise data hosting. Industry observers said the investment underlines expanding opportunities in India’s data centre ecosystem driven by accelerating digital adoption, regulatory emphasis on local data processing and rising demand from technology and cloud service providers. Developers are positioning scalable solutions to address emerging use cases and future-ready network architectures.

The Navi Mumbai centre will be engineered to support significant power and network requirements, a central consideration in a market where connectivity and computational workloads are increasing sharply. The development is expected to strengthen regional capacity at a moment when India’s overall data centre footprint is set to expand substantially and key hubs such as Navi Mumbai account for a large share of new infrastructure. Planners will need to integrate resilient power solutions and diverse fibre pathways to meet operator demands.

Despite the favourable outlook, challenges persist around securing reliable power supplies, high-speed connectivity and land for large-format sites, and both established players and new entrants must navigate competitive pressures as capacity expands. ESR’s entry is part of a broader trend of institutional capital flowing into digital infrastructure, reinforcing the sector’s strategic importance to India’s technology-enabled growth narrative. Stakeholders said collaboration between developers, utilities and regulators will be essential to translate investment into resilient, scalable capacity.