“Policy Momentum Giving Data Centre Players Confidence To Invest Ahead Of Curve”

ASHISH ARORA, CEO of Nxtra by Airtel, speaks to BW Businessworld’s Rohit Chintapali about how the company is scaling AI-ready data centre infrastructure across India, its plan to expand capacity from 300 MW to 1 GW, and why connectivity, power reliability and sustainability will define the next phase of India’s data centre and AI growth. Excerpts

- ASHISH ARORA

How is Nxtra embedding itself in India’s AI journey, particularly in terms of AI-ready data centre infrastructure, power density and connectivity?

At Nxtra, we have built one of India’s most advanced and sustainable data centre networks, designed to meet the evolving needs of enterprises, hyperscalers and government as they embrace AI at scale. We are deeply focusing on creating a future ready, AI optimised infrastructure that is intelligent through innovative design, sustainable by deliberate choice, and deeply integrated with Airtel’s industry-leading digital networks.

On AI ready infrastructure and power density, we are significantly stepping up investments to scale from nearly 300 MW today to 1 GW over the next few years. Our new campuses are being purpose-built as hyperscale, high density facilities with robust power and cooling infrastructure to support AI and ML workloads, large model training, and inference at scale. All our upcoming hyperscale facilities are being built to a minimum IGBC or LEED Gold green building standard, because energy and resource efficiency should be baked into design from day one. We are also the first data centre company in India to deploy AI within our operations, enabling predictive maintenance, energy efficiency automation, and optimised capital utilisation, initially at our Chennai facility and now being rolled out across all core facilities.