NEW GROUND FOR DATA BOOM

India's data surge is redrawing its digital map, as edge data centres rise in smaller cities to power Al, streaming, and 5G with low-latency access.

- BY VERNIKA AWAL

A steady rise of mobile data consumption in India, led by the rise of over-the-top (OTT) content streaming on the Internet, is poised to give a major fillip to India's data centre industry.

Alongside a boost in capacity to India's established data centre hubs such as Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai, in line to receive a strong amount of interest from global and domestic data centre operators are the tier-2 cities in India, where data centres of smaller capacities are projected to find mainstream prominence this year.

This rising trend has been a long time coming. Last year, media reports cited some of India's top data centre heads to state that the rise of tier-2 data centres, colloquially referred to as 'edge' data centres, have seen multiple delays in on-ground implementation due to the lack of need. A key reason for this was a slow but steady growth of OTT content.

BEGINNING OF THE DATA BOOM

Over the past year data consumption has skyrocketed in India, driven primarily by increasingly available live streaming content, and various mainstream media shifting to online platforms and away from satellite streaming.

TRAI's performance indicator report pegs India's average data consumption per person at 21.01 GB as of Q2FY25, up 10.1% from Q2FY24.

A case in point: in January this year, British pop band Coldplay's much anticipated concert in Ahmedabad's Narendra Modi Stadium was telecast live to viewers across the country throughout the band's performance. It was the first such live telecast at this scale. The live stream drew 165 million minutes of viewing time on Disney's Hotstar mobile streaming app.

"The rise in mobile application usage is driving demand for edge data centres in cities such as Bhubaneswar, Patna, Lucknow, Jaipur, Kochi, Raipur, and Hubli."