Adani Group to invest $4 billion for expanding data centre biz as AI powers demand: Report

The Adani group, which has only 2.5% of India's data centre market share now gets 50-100 MW orders, when it used to be 5-10 MW two years ago, as AI fuels demand

The Adani Group has a $4-billion plan to expand its data centre business quickly to capitalise on a surge in demand for data centre services from tech giants seen in the last six months, according to a Mint report, which cited two unnamed sources. HT couldn't independently verify the information.

The Adani group, which currently has only 2.5% of India's data centre market share now gets 50-100 MW orders, when it used to be 5-10 MW two years ago on average, due to the increased demand (Reuters)

The business named Adani ConneX Pvt. Ltd, a joint venture between Adani Enterprises Ltd. and Virginia-based EdgeConneX, will see expansion from its current 17 MW operational and 210 MW under-construction projects to 1-1.5 GW within one to two years from the earlier target of five years, according to the report.

The Adani group, which currently has only 2.5% of India's data centre market share now gets 50-100 MW orders, when it used to be 5-10 MW two years ago on average, due to the increased demand.

The expansion plan will also benefit the group's power generation business, which includes Adani Power Ltd. and Adani Green Energy Ltd since power alone accounts for 60% of a data centre’s operational cost, according to the report.

This is because services which use artificial intelligence (AI) such as those from WhatsApp, Google and Facebook, consume 8-12 times more power compared to non-AI computational needs and a simple ChatGPT search requires 10 times more electricity than a Google search.

Hyperscalers and colocation drives the demand. Hyperscaler clouds are large-scale cloud services run on a huge number of data centers. Colocation refers to the renting out of data center server capacity to companies.

Adani Enterprises mentioned its major hyperscale customers included Microsoft, Google, and AWS, among others, according to the article, which cited its latest annual report.

The Adani Group is not alone in this. Data centre demand has also pushed other major players in India like Nxtra by Airtel, Brookfield-RIL and Hiranandani's Yotta Data centres into expansion mode.

The Adani Group is constructing data centres in Noida and Hyderabad, with the first phase expected to be completed by the end of the financial year 2024-25, with AdaniConneX sealing the largest data centre financing deal in India the year before, according to the report.