India rises as hub for global digital infrastructure: Centrum report

India is increasingly being recognised as a credible alternative for long-term digital infrastructure partnerships, according to a recent report by Centrum. The report cites global trends such as 70 per cent of compute-intensive models being developed in the United States, China’s growing push for technological self-reliance, and Western markets’ focus on regulatory stability as factors positioning India as an attractive destination.

The report notes that India’s digital infrastructure opportunity is already taking shape. The country’s data centre capacity reached 1.4 GW in 2024, representing a market size of USD 5.03 billion. This capacity is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 21 per cent through 2030, nearly double the global average of 11.2 per cent.

Currently, India has 3.4 GW of data centre capacity under construction, supported by more than USD 50 billion in hyperscaler commitments. Despite this, the report highlights a significant demand-supply gap in the near future. By 2028, India’s projected data centre requirement is estimated between 6.5 GW and 8.3 GW, while supply is expected to reach only 4.8 GW. The report indicates that this gap could create premium pricing opportunities for early investors, especially as artificial intelligence (AI) workloads are projected to increase data centre power demand by 165 per cent by 2030.

Major industry players have already signalled confidence in India’s potential. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a USD 12.7 billion investment plan, Google is developing a USD 6 billion facility in Visakhapatnam, Microsoft is expanding with a USD 3 billion plan, and Reliance in partnership with NVIDIA is investing USD 25 billion in an AI infrastructure project in Jamnagar.

The report also emphasises the role of India’s strong digital economy in supporting infrastructure growth. The country processes 164 billion annual UPI transactions, has over 547 million OTT users, and records nearly 17.4 exabytes of monthly data consumption, reflecting extensive digital engagement and cloud demand.

Centrum’s report points out that India is at the centre of a historic opportunity to capture significant value from the global AI infrastructure revolution. Unlike previous technology cycles, AI represents an “existential necessity,” with workloads growing from GPT-1’s 117 million parameters to current frontier models requiring over 30 trillion tokens. This has dramatically increased infrastructure demands, from traditional 4–8 kW per rack to AI training requirements of 30–120 kW per rack, resulting in specialised market segments including high-density “AI factories” for training and distributed inference centres.