Mumbai: Reliance Industries has partnered with Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty Trust for developing data centers in India, heating up competition in the fast-growing market.
Mukesh Ambani’s conglomerate will enter an existing joint venture, in which Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty are already partners. The three parties will each own 33 per cent of the entity, known as ‘Digital Connexionn: A Brookfield, Jio and Digital Realty Company,’ the companies said in a joint statement.
The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to be completed in about three months, they said. Reliance will invest Rs3.78 billion ($46 million) in Mercury Holdings, the Brookfield and Digital Realty joint venture, the Mumbai-based company said in a separate statement.
Ambani is wading into a market that has already seen investments announced by rivals Gautam Adani’s Adani Group and Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Airtel in recent months. Data center and compute capacity requirements of the country are set to jump on growing localization of personal data, increasing access to digital services and adoption of data-intensive technologies like artificial intelligence among other drivers.
The venture is currently developing data centers in Chennai and Mumbai. The first 20 megawatt greenfield data center in Chennai is expected to be completed by the end of this year, the joint statement said Monday. It recently announced the purchase of 2.15 acres of land in Mumbai to build a 40MW data center.
“India is a mostly untapped market for the data center industry driven by the rapid adoption of digital business models, the world’s largest population, and a government that recognizes the role of technology for future economic development,” Serene Nah, managing director and head of Asia Pacific, Digital Realty, said in the statement.
