A week after the Adani group announced plans to enter the data centre space with ₹70,000 crore investment plan, another Mumbai-based real estate developer Hiranandani launched a new data center business called Yotta.

Getting on a triple digit growth in the data centre space in India, Hiranandani group is looking to invest about ₹15,000 crore over the next 5-7 years in setting up data centres in Mumbai, Panvel and Chennai.

Speaking to BusinessLine , Niranjan Hiranandani, Founder and Managing Director at Hiranandani Group said, “The fault is Prime Minister Narendra Modi who said he wants a digital India. He wants Make in India, he wants data to be located in India and a $5 trillion economy. If you put these together, the data centre space that has grown over 100 per cent year-on-year in the last two years, will grow at the same pace in the next five years.”

Hiranandani Group has already built two large datacentres in India for NTT Group’s Netmagic — a data center co-location company.

The real estate group has roped in Netmagic’s former executive director Sunil Gupta as the CEO of the newly formed Yotta. Hiranandani said the company continues to build more datacentres for Netmagic while at the same time it will be building 11 datacentre buildings of its own in Panvel, Mumbai and Chennai. A 100 per cent subsidiary of the Hiranandani Group, Yotta will offer hyper-density, hyper-scalable data centre and co-location solutions to enterprises with supporting managed IT, hybrid multi cloud and security services.

“We have the expertise for building data centres, we have the land suitable for data centres. We also have the most important expertise of power efficiency. These put together, we are sure to bring down the data centre cost by 20 per cent,” Hiranandani said.

Adani group last week said it will be setting up data centre parks with an investment of ₹70,000 crore over a period of 20 years. Hiranandani however, seems to be moving faster with their first data centre in Panvel expected to be completed by December and the remaining 10 are expected to come up over the next 5-7 years.

The data centre market in India has doubled in the last 3 years and is projected to grow 1.5x by 2020. The overall cloud services market in India is expected to touch $4 billion by 2020. “It will be the country’s largest data center building,” Hiranandani said. “We are spending about ₹1,000 crore to setup the data centre. The cost of land and construction is about ₹400 crore. That’s ₹1,400 crore per building. We are looking to setup 11 such centres in Mumbai and Chennai,” Hiranandani said.

The data centre parks will be spread over 50 acres near major international fiber landing stations with server hall capacity of over 60,000 racks and 500 MW power. The first data centre park is scheduled to go live by December 2019 at Hiranandani Fortune City township in Panvel, followed by Chennai and Mumbai.

“Data center business is a very high capex business and therefore 99.9 percent developers in India will never be able to enter the space. The demand is massive and we are here to fill the demand-supply gap in the market,” Hiranandani said.

To support the power needs, Hiranandani Group will also be setting up a 60 MW solar power plant in Maharashtra that the company said should be able to start generating at least 30 MW power by early next year.

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