India’s Gigawatt Gold Rush: Powering the Data Centre Boom

India is amidst a “gigawatt gold rush” as its data centre sector prepares for exponential expansion. From 1.2 gigawatts today, capacity is projected to exceed 3 gigawatts in the next five years. This explosion in demand is drawing global tech giants, Indian conglomerates, and power infrastructure firms into fierce competition for land, approvals, and power supply.

Why India? Multiple factors are converging to make the country a hotbed for data infrastructure:

• Lower power costs and large land availability compared to many developed markets.
• Strong cloud and AI demand, as enterprises increasingly push data, compute, and model training workloads local.
• Government initiatives, incentives, and digital policy support that encourage local infrastructure growth.

Still, the path forward is riddled with challenges. Developers must navigate a complex web of over 30 regulatory approvals related to land, environmental compliance, power connection, and local governance. These bureaucratic hurdles can delay projects and inflate costs. At the same time, the market could face oversupply, pricing pressure, and high capital expenditure burdens.

Some emerging winners in this race are local property groups that facilitate land acquisition and infrastructure developers who can bundle power solutions and grid connectivity. As the sector matures, consolidation is expected among developers who cannot scale or fund new projects efficiently.

If India succeeds in delivering high-quality, reliable data centre infrastructure at competitive power costs, it could redefine the global data map — attracting more foreign investment, increasing tech sovereignty, and accelerating the country’s role in the AI and cloud era.

Sources

• Intellectia summary of CNBC’s Inside India: India’s Gigawatt Gold Rush
• CNBC’s Inside India newsletter (via social media posts)
• “India’s data center sector is in the middle of a gold rush” — commentary on sector growth