The Web farms will host and co-locate internet sites from the region thus effectively routing the traffic from other parts of the world to India. At present, India has an imbalance in internet traffic flow since most of the sites are located in the US. Earlier, VSNL had announced its plans to set up server farms in Pune, Mumbai and Chennai.

Intel is planning to network the internet traffic through its web server farms, thus effectively becoming a single point host. The company has set up similar Web server farms in the US and Europe and each farm consists around 10,000 servers. "These are highly cost optimised, remotely managed server units with high redundancy," claims Intel director for marketing, enterprise and internet communication, Daniel Louppe.

Intel is believed to have outlined major investment for the India plans but the official did not divulge any details.

On the locational advantages of these farms, he said that care has been taken not to place these networks in any natural calamity-prone areas. The company is currently working with most of the ISPs under its ISP Programme, under which there are 200 members from the worldover and 30 from India.

Louppe said that Intel was looking to provide core architecture to all e-commerce companies. "Service and support tools and data management would be our core focus areas. ," Louppe said.

The target companies would be business ISPs and e-commerce providers. Louppe explained that Intel had big ideas about the spread of the internet. "These companies will need server technology and client architecture and we will be the building block suppliers. Whatever the form the access devices takes, we provide the suitable chips for such a device," he said.