The Homegrown Data Centre Boom

SHARAD AGARWAL, CEO, Sify Infinit Spaces, discusses India’s accelerating data centre build-out, AI readiness and the importance of disciplined, market-led growth in a conversation with Rohit Chintapali

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Sify has been in the data centre business for 26 years. Does this longevity give you a distinct competitive moat?

Yes, it absolutely does. To understand why, it helps to look at the three segments of our 100 per cent addressable market: hyperscalers, enterprise and edge. Hyperscalers operate out of giga-scale campuses that demand hundreds of megawatts at a single location to host neo-cloud and AI workloads. The enterprise segment, on the other hand, was an 85-90 megawatt market last year and is growing at 20-25 per cent annually.

Sify enjoys close to a 20 per cent market share here, driven largely by the banking and financial services sector.

Because of strict RBI and Sebi policies and frequent audits, Indian banks have largely chosen not to migrate to the public cloud. Their demand therefore has to be served through dedicated, physical data centres.

The third segment is edge data centres, which typically require around 10 megawatts of capacity and support latency-sensitive use cases.

Addressing all three segments simultaneously requires deep expertise across networks, managed services, renewable energy and constant engagement with local policy and regulatory bodies.

Sify’s longevity has allowed us to successfully navigate four distinct technology waves: the ISP wave of the early 2000s, the digital transformation and cloudification phase up to 2014, the hyperscaler wave from 2015 onwards, and now the AI wave. Each of these phases has built layers of robust infrastructure directly into our data centres.

Our biggest asset is connectivity. Today, the second-best-connected data centre network in any Indian city is Sify. This gives us a very strong moat when competing for enterprise RFPs.