Mumbai, Dec 26 (FN Bureau) Due to the delivery of pre-committed supply to hyperscale cloud service providers (CSP), the data centre industry is expected to close the year with robust demand growth with estimated absorption in the range of 150-170MW1, according to JLL’s Year ender ‘The 2022 story: Indian real estate’s rise from the lows.” ‘’Colocation (Colo) operators are scaling up construction to meet the delivery targets. Some operators adopted retrofitting existing buildings to reduce the time of delivery. Supply has been mostly concentrated in Mumbai due to submarine cable connectivity, power availability and a large user market.
As the year 2022 comes to an end, the supply is expected to exceed 2021 levels by a healthy margin,’’ the firm that specializes in real estate and investment management said.“The India Data Centre industry is expected to add 681 MW capacity by the end of 2024 leading to a doubling of capacity to 1,318 MW which will need 7.8 million sq. ft of real estate space. Mumbai is expected to account for 57% of the new supply followed by Chennai at 25%. Increasing digitisation is expected to save costs and make organisations resilient in times of uncertainty which will be one of the key drivers of data centres’ growth in India. The impact of 5G rollout, personal data protection legislation and investment incentives is expected to drive multi-year growth of Indian data centres,” Rachit Mohan, Head, Data Centre Advisory, India, JLL.‘’Public service cloud providers continue to see double-digit demand growth driven by the increasing use of digital services by BFSI, manufacturing, public sector, media, gaming, etc. In turn, this is expected to drive increasing demand for the data centre industry,” he added.‘’
Like other industries, the Data Centre has been equally impacted due to global disruptions, both man-made and natural. Climate change has been at the doorstep with a sharp rise in temperatures leading to unprecedented drought-like conditions in Europe. On the other hand, some countries have faced high rainfalls posing an operational challenge for existing Data Centres. This coupled with supply chain disruption caused by the geo-political crisis has added to the complications. The supply disruption of sources of power generation like crude and gas has led to a rethink among Data Centre players in setting up capacities. The impact of these outages especially due to sustainability issues is likely to result in a shift of data centre operations to other locations. India with its vast geographical resources, thrust on renewable energy, increasing submarine cable connectivity and cost competitiveness is likely to emerge as an alternative data centre hub,’’ JLL said.