Yotta Infra to invest ₹3,500 cr on data centres

Yotta Infrastructure, an arm of the Hiranandani Group, will spend ₹3,500 crore on three datacentres in Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai in the next two years.

The first of these, the ₹1,100-crore Yotta NM1, with 7,200 racks, is ready at the Panvel Datacentre Park. The 8.2 lakh sq ft facility is first of the 5-6 buildings that would come up at the park.

“Each of the buildings will have about 5,000 racks. The NM1 has 7,200 racks,” Sunil Gupta, Chief Executive Officer of Yotta Infrastructure, said.

The fault-tolerant design makes the data centre withstand any eventuality. Any single point of failure in power and cooling systems and various supporting systems including structural, civil, automation and others cannot bring down a customer’s rack or other infrastructure at any point of time.

It received ‘highest’ certification for data centre design – the Uptime Institute Tier IV Certification of Design Documents Certification (TCDDUSA).

Construction work at Chennai, which would have begun this July, has been delayed by three months due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “We have submitted the proposals with the local government and got necessary permissions. We are going to start work in October 1. It will be ready by October 2021,” he said. In Delhi, the firm is in the process of acquiring 20-acres for the datacentre. “We expect work to begin there in October. It should go live by January 2022,” he said.

Strategy

“Each of the parks in the three cities will have 5-6 buildings and each of the buildings would have 5,000 racks,” he said.

In a 7-10 year framework, the company targets to build 25-30,000 racks in each of the parks by spending about ₹15,000 crore.

Sunil Gupta said that the demand for cloud infrastructure is growing significantly. The statutory requirement to store the data locally would further boost the demand, as would the upcoming 5G and Internet of Things.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to the spurt in the demand for cloud infrastructure. There is not enough supply to meet the demand that we currently see,” he said.

Besides, several companies have begun to shift their captive cloud infrastructure to third party data centres after the lessons they learned in the lockdowns during the pandemic.

To support its Mumbai data centre park, the firm is building two power plants, one solar-based and the other powered by gas, with a total investment of ₹500 crore.