Inside India's race to build Al-ready data centres at scale

As AI workloads scale, India's data centres are being redefined by power, cooling, sustainability, and trust, transforming them into core infrastructure of the digital economy.

- Shrikanth G

India's data centre industry has entered a decisive phase. What was once a conversation dominated by space, uptime, and connectivity has shifted sharply towards power density, cooling efficiency, and sustainability at scale. The rise of artificial intelligence workloads, particularly GPU-intensive training and inference models, has fundamentally altered how data centres are designed, built, and operated.

Enterprises, cloud providers, and governments are no longer planning for incremental growth. Instead, they are preparing for step-change demand driven by AI platforms, sovereign cloud initiatives, and the expansion of global capability centres. This shift is pushing infrastructure beyond traditional enterprise norms and exposing structural constraints that were previously manageable, most notably around power availability, grid readiness, and water usage.

Across India, new facilities are being conceived as Al-ready by default. This means planning for rack densities far above historical norms, designing cooling systems that can handle sustained thermal loads, and securing long-term power through a mix of grid supply, renewables, captive generation, and storage. The data centre is no longer a passive container for IT; it has become an active, engineered system that must balance performance, resilience, and environmental impact simultaneously.

POWER BECOMES THE PRIMARY DESIGN CONSTRAINT