Data centres as strategic assets

Decisions on data centres' power sourcing, cooling, and siting taken today will lock in impact for decades

- PRATEEK AGGARWAL DEBANJAN BAGUI

GEOPOLITICAL TENSIONS AND conflicts across regions, most visibly in West Asia and Eastern Europe, have exposed a stark vulnerability in the global digital economy—the physical fragility of digital infrastructure.

The risks became tangible when drone strikes reportedly damaged Amazon Web Services’ data-centre infrastructure in the Gulf. In response, hyper-scale cloud providers and digital enterprises are increasingly reassessing where critical infrastructure should be located, with countries such as India emerging as potential destinations for future capacity.

For India, this shift is both a strategic warning and an opportunity. As the country’s digital economy approaches $1 trillion by 2030, disruptions to global cloud infrastructure could affect financial settlementsystems and the digital platforms that underpin commerce and governance. Strengthening domestic capacity to store and process data is, therefore, becoming a national priority. India has taken an important first step through the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act and targeted localisation mandates. The next critical step is to build a resilient domestic data-centre ecosystem and treat these facilities as strategic infrastructure.

As cloud and artificial intelligence data centres grow rapidly, choices on location, energy, and cooling will shape India’s power and resource use for decades.