Japan’s NTT, a leading global IT infrastructure and services company and market leader in the Indian data centre industry has said the company is mulling over building data centres in tier II cities as part of its expansion plan. The company has identified land parcels across the tier two cities such as Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Bhopal and Chandigarh, among others.
Sharad Sanghi, chairman, NTT Global Data Centers & Cloud Infrastructure, India said: “We are getting into tier II cities and have identified land parcels. Though we have been working on it, we are yet to finalise the exact date of launching our data centres in tier two cities.”
He was in Chennai to launch the company’s latest hyper-scale data centre campus and announced the arrival of its subset cable system MIST in the city. The new Chennai campus is spread across 6 acres with a total planned capacity of 34.8 MW critical IT load from two data centre buildings. The first facility went live on Thursday has a 17.4 MW IT load capacity. The company is investing $ 300 million on the Chennai campus in phases.
With the launch of the Chennai data center campus, NTT’s data centre footprint in the country has grown to 16 facilities, with more than 3.1 million sq- ft and 205MW of IT power, further strengthening its position as the market leader in India in this segment.
Currently, the NTT group has 16 data centres operational in four cities – Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Noida near Delhi. The group is building 11 more data centres in the above four cities and in Kolkata.The group is also setting up captive renewable power projects in India apart from buying from others.
Sanghi said a typical data centre would involve an investment of about $100-150 million. NTT had announced an investment of $2 billion four years back and the outlay for the Chennai centre is part of that. The group is investing about $500 million a year. In India. According to him, India ranks number three in terms of business for NTT globally and will soon go higher up as the potential is large.
Globally the $108 billion Japanese group is present in 20 countries with 1,900 MW IT load and over 1,000 MW additional planned.
Sanghi said the group commands 22% data centre market share in India. The capacity utilisation of the data centres is at about 70-80%.About the group’s renewable energy plans he said the focus is on solar and solar-wind hybrid plants. The group also will buy power from renewable sources.
Shekhar Sharma, CEO & MD, NTT Global Data Centers & Cloud Infrastructure India saidthat the IT load of the existing data centres is about 204 MW and by March 2024 it will go up to 349.2 MW owing to expansions. He said if one takes into account the current and future planned, the additional IT load will be 526.4 MW taking the total for NTT in India to 821.8 MW.
The officials said the MIST (Malaysia, India, Singapore and Thailand) subsea cable-the first cable system for the NTT group-will provide direct connectivity to and from India.
The subsea cable spans 8,100 km and will connect the above four countries. It is also the first cable landing of a 12-fiber pair capacity, capable of carrying more than 200 TBPS of data.