CHENNAI: With 41.4 MW live capacity, Chennai has emerged as the top city in India in data centre capacity. As of third quarter of 2022, Hyderabad and Delhi stand second and third with 33.7MW and 32.6 MW capacity, says a report by international property consultant Knight Frank.
The report was published in partnership with DC Byte, a leading data centre research and analytics platform. The emergence of Chennai as one of the fastest growing data centre markets in India and its proximity to Asia's major cities have made Tamil Nadu the top choice for housing secondary or disaster recovery data centre sites, said Preetham Mehra, senior executive director and head, Government Practice, CBRE India. Usually, it takes a $5m investment to create 1MW (without land) capacity, says Mehra.
Tamil Nadu Information Technology Minister T Mano Thangaraj has recently said data centre is one of the six growth areas identified by the state government in IT sector. "Tamil Nadu has a huge potential with regard to data centres. Focus is on setting up such centres in tier -2 and tier-3 cities in the state where you get the same kind of power, talent, infrastructure and connectivity," the minister said at the India Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructures Summit organised by ASSOCHAM.
The city, which already hosts several small- to-medium-scale DC facilities, recorded some big-ticket investments in the sector in recent times. Techno Electric and Engineering Ltd (TEECL), one of the prominent power-infrastructure companies, recently announced plan to set up state-of-the-art hyper-scale data centre in Chennai with an investment of $160 million. The data centre will be equipped with an IT load capacity of 24 MW. Additionally, the facility will be powered by a 111.9 MW captive wind energy source from within Tamil Nadu.
Shishir Baijal, Chairman and Managing Director at Knight Frank India, said Hyderabad, New Delhi and Chennai were registering significant data centre market growth with almost two-thirds of the existing capacity being added in just the last two years.
Currently, data centre locations in Chennai include Ambattur and Siruseri in West and South Chennai, respectively. In recent times, Oragadam in West Chennai has been witnessing growing investor interest and is expected to emerge as a key data centre destination in the city. Mehra said land value has increased in Ambattur area with data centres mushrooming in that area.