Reliance Industries Partners With Brookfield And Digital Realty To Shape India's Data Centre Infrastructure

On 24 July, Reliance Industries announced its plan to invest a sum of $122.24 million in establishing data centres within India, partnering with Canada-based Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty, reports Economic Times.

This move comes amidst the anticipated exponential growth of data centre capacity in the country due to the increasing number of individuals getting connected to the internet, with the country already among the world's largest consumers of mobile data. 

The joint statement said continuous developments in generative AI technologies rely on hardware and data centre infrastructure, and so an increase in demand for these resources is predicted.

Furthermore, there is an emphasis on preserving personal data within the country, which adds to the demand for additional data centre capacity in India.

Digital Realty Trust is recognised as the leading global provider of cloud and carrier-neutral data centres, colocation, and interconnection services.

Operating an extensive network comprising more than 300 data centres in 27 countries, the company has teamed up with Brookfield Infrastructure to form a joint venture.

This collaboration aims to develop high-quality, highly-connected, scalable data centres to meet the critical infrastructure needs of enterprises and digital services companies in India.

RIL will become an equal partner in this joint venture, to be rebranded as ‘Digital Connexion: A Brookfield, Jio and Digital Realty Company’.

The JV will meet the cloud and colocation demands of both local and global organisations, small and medium-sized enterprises, and the startups.

At present, the JV is actively working on building data centres in prominent areas of Chennai and Mumbai.

RIL stated that the first greenfield data centre, named MAA10, with a capacity of 20 megawatts (MW), will be situated on a 100 MW campus in Chennai.

The completion of MAA10 is projected to take place by the end of 2023.

It recently announced the acquisition of 2.15 acres of land in Mumbai, to build a 40 MW data centre, the statement added.

“The partnership will help us serve our enterprise and SMB clients with cutting-edge, plug-and-play solutions delivered from the cloud and lead their digital transformation and make them more competitive and efficient,” said Kiran Thomas, chief executive officer, Jio Platforms Limited.