India’s data centre industry to see threefold revenue growth in five years: JLL

According to JLL’s recent report, India’s Data Centre Industry – Poised at the Tipping Point, India’s data centre industry is set to register a threefold growth in revenue to $3.2 billion by 2024 and likely to propel the development of additional real-estate space of 7.8 million sq ft to set up data centre facilities. 

The country’s fast-expanding e-commerce sector, use of smartphones and social media, the government’s focus on digital economy and rise in technology-driven start-ups have led to rapid growth in data usage and storage, increasing data centre space. In addition to this, the entry of several global cloud service providers is adding to space take-up.

With the advent of the Internet and mobile phones, India’s data centre industry continues to provide data storage, computing and other value-added services. To meet rising demand from data localisation and increasing data usage, India’s data centre industry capacity is projected to increase by an additional 431 MW in the next five years from the current levels of 350 MW (design IT power load) in 2018-19, the report added. This expansion is expected to provide a greenfield investment opportunity of $4.1 billion to set up data centres.

 “India’s supremacy in IT is unparalleled,” said Ramesh Nair, CEO & Country Head-India, JLL. “We’re now witnessing an increasing interest for data centre facilities from enterprises and investors, both domestic and international. Businesses around the world continue to work on data consolidation, storage and cloud adoption. As a result, over the past couple of years, we have seen a spike in demand for data centres. While a significant share of this demand and opportunity is coming from investors, greenfield acquisitions for co-location and hyper-scale players and rack migration for corporates offer tremendous business potential.Lower real-estate cost and skilled manpower, improved quality of power supply and adequate linkages globally with cable landing stations are some key factors driving multinational players to 

the country.” 

“There is an unprecedented growth of consumption patterns by cloud companies around the world, and now in India,”said Rachit Mohan, India Head, Data Centre, JLL. “The anticipated data localisation bill, big data boom backed by IoT and increasing OTT consumption of data is fuelling opportunity for large global and Indian colocation data centre operators to design and build high-quality data centre infrastructure in India. This digital revolution will continue to attract significant investments in years to come.”

“India’s 578 million mobile phone (wireless) data users – the world’s second-largest digital population – has been consuming data at the speed of 1,500 GB per second and this is expected to increase further,” said, Dr Samantak Das, Chief Economist and Head of Research & REIS, JLL India. “This will bring in the need for more space and is expected to bring in greenfield investment opportunity of $4.1 billion to setup data centres.”

Growing concerns over cyber security, data privacy laws and compliances are transforming markets worldover. Increasing demand for cloud computing solutions necessitates data centres that are optimised for data storage and speed to deliver the best user experience possible, the report adds.