Big Tech's $10Bn bet to make India a global AI data centre hub

When Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang visited India in October 2024, he had sage advice for the country: invest in artificial intelligence (AI) data centres. “There's a new manufacturing industry. Don't wait 20 years to get into it. Start now by harvesting and processing data here and then exporting the intelligence," Huang said at NVidia’s AI Summit held in Mumbai.

This shift is well underway. Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the cloud computing arm of Amazon—is quietly leasing newly constructed, industrial-grade buildings in Navi Mumbai, a suburb on the periphery of the country’s financial capital. 

AWS is not only leasing buildings from its old-time data centre partners, otherwise known as colocation providers, such as NTT, Sify, and CtrlS, but is even partnering with many newer PE-backed data centre operators to meet the requirement. The latter—including BlackRock-backed Lumina, Singapore-based PDG, Colt, and Digital Edge, which have been building large facilities in Navi Mumbai and were looking for tenants—have signed up AWS as their first customer.

The company intends to use these to establish one of the largest AI infrastructure setups in Asia, three well-placed sources close to AWS and its partner data centre operators told The CapTable. While the company is yet to go public with its plans, the upcoming AI data centres will be AWS’ largest outside its home country of the US.