MUMBAI: India’s data appetite is getting a serious upgrade and the infrastructure is racing to keep up. The country’s data centre footprint is projected to surge to 101 million sq ft by 2030, nearly four times the 27 million sq ft recorded in the first half of 2026, as digital consumption, cloud adoption and artificial intelligence fuel demand for computing infrastructure.
According to Anarock Capital’s latest report, Data Centre: The Blueprint of The Digital Fortress in India, India’s data centre footprint has grown from just 0.6 million sq ft in 2007 to 10.5 million sq ft in 2022 and 27 million sq ft in H1 2026.
The expansion is not just about more floor space. India currently has 164 operational data centres, with operational IT capacity exceeding 1.8 GW. By 2030, the number of facilities is expected to rise to 210, while IT capacity is projected to cross 6.7 GW.
And there is plenty of money chasing that expansion. More than USD 300 billion in investment commitments are supporting India’s upcoming data centre build-out, placing the country among the fastest-growing major markets globally.
Worldwide, the scale is even larger. Global data centre capacity stood at more than 92 GW in H1 2026 and is projected to cross 210 GW by 2030, supported by investment announcements worth around USD 3 trillion.
Artificial intelligence is emerging as one of the biggest forces behind the infrastructure boom. Anarock Capital estimates that AI workloads could account for 70 per cent of data centre demand by 2030.
That demand comes with a heavier power bill. AI workloads require significantly more computing power, storage and energy than conventional applications and can demand 10–20 times the power density of traditional servers.
For data centre operators, that makes the next phase of expansion as much about power and cooling as it is about racks and real estate.
“The projected 101 Mn sq ft data centre footprint highlights the sheer physical scale of the real estate opportunity,” said Shobhit Agarwal, CEO, Anarock Capital.
Unlike conventional office or industrial projects, he noted, data centres require large land parcels, substantial power capacity, advanced cooling, robust connectivity and high operational resilience.
The infrastructure build-out therefore creates opportunities well beyond the buildings themselves, spanning strategically located land, power infrastructure, renewable energy, engineering and construction, fibre connectivity and specialised cooling systems.
The demand is being underpinned by the sheer scale of India’s digital consumption. The country had more than 950 million internet users in H1 2026, while mobile internet users exceeded 880 million.
India’s data consumption is estimated at more than 25 TB per second, giving data centre operators an increasingly large stream of traffic to process, store and serve.
The numbers suggest that India’s data centre story is moving from a niche infrastructure play to a much broader intersection of real estate, technology and energy.
With the footprint expected to jump from 27 million sq ft to 101 million sq ft by 2030, India’s digital growth is increasingly becoming a physical one, the cloud, it turns out, needs a lot of ground beneath it.