Nxtra by Airtel, Indian telecoms company Bharti Airtel's data centre subsidiary, has launched a new 38MW hyperscale data centre in Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The new facility is Nxtra’s third in Chennai.
The new facility occupies over 25,000 square metres. It is said to be fully integrated with Airtel’s global submarine cable network, enabling it to offer end-to-end solutions to customers.
With this launch, Nxtra by Airtel now operates the largest network of data centres in India, including 11 hyperscaler and 120 edge data centres, and of course it also manages a number of submarine landing stations.
The Airtel subsidiary recently said that it will invest Rs 5,000 crores (about $671.2 million) by 2025 to increase its capacity by three times to over 400MW. This will include setting up hyperscale data centre parks in key metro cities.
And of course there’s a sustainability angle. Nxtra by Airtel is already scaling up its use of green energy for its data centres and aims to source 50 percent of the power requirements of these centres through renewable sources as part of Airtel’s overall greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.
As India’s Economic Times notes, 5G is not far off in India (notwithstanding a number of spectrum auction debates and delays). There’s also a fast-growing digital economy, and enterprises are transitioning to cloud. Add local data storage regulations and the Indian data centre industry can reasonably expect to see a more than doubling of its installed capacity from 450MW to 1074MW by 2023.
