Hiranandani INR 30,000 CR War Chest For Data Center Unit
Real estate player Hiranandani group is all set to double up on its investment plans for its data center unit Yotta where the company is expecting windfall gains. The two-year old venture has not only setup India’s first Tier IV data center in less than a year’s time at Mumbai but is already starting to replicate the initial success in other cities as well. “The demand has been overwhelming for our first data center in Mumbai. Being the only Tier IV certified data center has also played a big role in this. It gives us more confidence to expand at an even more rapid pace,” Sunil Gupta, CEO, Yotta. “One building of the size we are making costs us about INR 1,200 crore. We are making five such in Mumbai, six in Noida, six in Chennai, three in Pune, three in Calcutta and one in Gujarat. Idea is to start the first building as a risk investment and then rapidly scale from there. Overall the investment could well surpass INR 30,000 crore over the next 5 years,” Gupta said. According to Gupta, the biggest growth is coming from the shift towards digitization that’s being observed since the beginning of Covid-19 in early 2020. “The growth was already quite phenomenal pre-Covid but Covid has fuelled the demand for cloud services manifold leading to a massive growth in demand for data center space,” Gupta explained. Some of the biggest customers for Yotta are hyperscalers who are eyeing not just a few racks or a floor but entire data center buildings in one go, Gupta said. Hyperscalers is a term used for large cloud services players such as AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure and IBM. “Delhi was not in the initial plan but we already have an entire building taken up by a client even before it is up and running. UP government has been very helpful in terms of approvals etc. Today we are building our first data center in UP but we have bought enough land there to be able to scale it to 6 data centers there. To support that, we are also building a substation of 300 MW that’ll be sufficient for 6 data centers there,” Gupta said. Yotta is banking on parent Hiranandani group for acquisition of land for setting up large data center parks in various parts of the country instead of picking space for one data center at a time. Gupta says that allows the company to setup its captive power stations for providing backup power and the negotiating power that is necessary in the highly competitive market.
Tags : News/Views Investment Hiranandani Group Yotta Data Centre Hyperscalers Data Center Parks Cloud Services