Digital infrastructure company Equinix is planning to build its fourth data centre in India, which will also be its third facility in the city of Mumbai. The company aims to invest more than $86 million developing the facility.
The new MB3 International Business Exchange (IBX),described as the largest data centre in India focusing on retail enterprise customers and interconnection, is to be built on a four-acre plot in Mumbai’s commercial district, next to Equinix’s existing MB2 facility.
The first phase of MB3 is scheduled to open in the second quarter of 2024. It will provide an initial capacity of more than 1,375 cabinets, and more than 4,150 cabinets when fully built out. According to the Data Centre Dynamics website, this is more than double the company’s existing footprint in the city.
Further investments in building infrastructure in India are planned by the company, whose existing two Mumbai facilities total more than 8,200 square metres of colocation space and an initial 1,350 cabinets, with an additional 500 cabinets to be built out.
And this sort of activity seems likely to accelerate if a recent report from ratings agency CRISIL proves correct.
It suggests that data centre capacity in India could double to 1,700-1,800MW between the 2022 and 2025 fiscal years. This expansion will be driven by such factors as the data boom, digital adoption and local data storage mandates, along with the launch of 5G services.
Mumbai, the financial capital of the country, accounts for around half of the existing capacity and is likely to do best out of this boom, not least because it is near to subsea cables, optic fibre connectivity, power and skilled manpower. Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune will also do well.
