Bharti Airtel is planning to invest approximately Rs 3,500 crore within the next three years to develop its data centre capacity from the current 100 MW to between three and five times. To tap into the growing requirement to store digital information nearby among a strong uptake in digital payments and the expected launch of 5G services. Earlier in India, most of the digital content was not stored in the country. In recent times, this content has been stored locally, driving the demand for data centres. The previous year, US-based Carlyle Group acquired a 25% stake in the Nxtra Data for around $235 million, valuing the firm at nearly $1.2 billion. The investment plans of Airtel appear at a time when the likes of Indian business houses such as Adani and the US Microsoft are gambling high on the segment. According to the media reports, the data centre industry of India is likely to increase to 1,007 MW by the year 2023 from its current capacity of 447 MW. Increasing digital connectivity, IoT-linked devices, data localisation, the launch of 5G, cloud adoption indicates that the data centre sector of India would need an investment of $3.7 billion over the coming three years to satisfy a greenfield development opportunity of 6 million sq ft for this sector. Moreover, Airtel plans to assist its clients in landing their content on Indian shores utilising its submarine cables and then host that on its data centres. The telecommunications company has nearly 130 data edge centres, and all together, including its ten large data centres, it has a total capacity of 100 MW. Airtel has divided its clients into huge Internet companies, which require a large portion of space, two floors, and then a second kind, who needs their complete IT works developed and managed and another migrating to cloud. Image Source Also read: Ascendas to invest Rs 1,200 cr for data centre campus in India Also read: Brookfield, Digital Realty to jointly develop data centres in India