NTT Ltd is planning to invest $2 billion in the next four years for building additional data centres, solar parks and its undersea cable network.

The investments will go into data centres, setting up of multiple solar parks, expansion into cities such as Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru, and construction of the optical submarine cable, connecting Singapore, Myanmar and India. “We are increasing our footprint seeing a significant growth in demand for IT infrastructure related needs in the country,” said Sharad Sanghi, CEO, Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure of NTT in India.

Masaaki Moribayashi, Senior Executive Vice-President, Services of NTT Ltd, said that’s the reason the company continues to expand its portfolio of data centres in new and existing markets that complement its global geographic footprint.

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The launch of the Mumbai 7 Data Center, is the third hyperscale data centre in Chandivali, a suburb. Together, NTT’s Mumbai hub of data centres makes the Chandivali campus India’s first and largest operational hyperscale data centre park, which totals over 1,000,000 sq.ft., 13,000 racks and 100 MW of load capacity, the company said. With the addition of Mumbai 7 Data Center, NTT’s Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure division in India currently operates with 10 data centres across four major cities with 1.5 million sq.ft. and over 150 MW of power capacity. Further, the company plans to double its capacity in the next two to three years.

Solar power

In line with this, power requirements have also grown for NTT as well as other data centre services providers. NTT has announced that its 50 MW solar power plant in Solapur is operational, which Sanghi said was built with Tata Power and would meet 83 per cent of its energy requirements. “This will be for captive use only,” said Sanghi. The capacity can be expanded to generate another 50 MW solar power in the future.

According to 451 Research, the data centre market is growing at 23 per cent CAGR due to increased demand from global cloud providers and a proposed data sovereignty law by the Indian government, as well as other geopolitical factors. Recently, Yotta Infrastructure, a part of the Hiranandani Group, launched the first of its five data centre buildings at the Integrated Yotta Data Center Park, located in the 600-acre Hiranandani Fortune City in Panvel. When fully built, it will have an overall capacity of 30,000 racks (of server computers) and 250 MW load capacity.