Is Your Infrastructure AI-Ready? How India’s Data Centres Are Powering the Next Tech Leap

Over the past year, artificial intelligence has become a core business enabler among Indian enterprises, as the technology finds footing across sectors. According to an IDC Info Snapshot, the AI and generative AI market in India is projected to grow to over USD 9 billion by 2028, underlining that enterprise digital evolution is at a decisive phase. We see enterprises of all sizes and sectors looking to embed AI into operations at scale, whether it is enhancing customer service in banking, accelerating diagnostics in healthcare, or automating planning in manufacturing. 

While the early adopters in the country were large firms, a growing number of small and medium-sized businesses are also investing in AI to improve productivity and remain competitive. Businesses are deploying AI agents that manage routine tasks, recommend actions, design workflows, and train employees; applications which require large-scale processing, rapid data exchange, and strong security controls. Data centres must now operate as intelligent platforms capable of supporting high-performance AI workloads with reliability and speed, as the need increases for infrastructure that can support AI without delays, vulnerabilities, or inefficiencies.

Preparing infrastructure for the AI era

Traditional facilities built for storage or cloud hosting need to be redesigned for the infrastructural need of managing continuous data flows, enabling real-time processing, and supporting applications that learn and evolve. Data centres stand at the frontline of this change and need to adapt rapidly to be able to provide uninterrupted, high-compute, GPU-intensive functionality like never before. This ‘AI-readiness’ can be measured with the speed and ability of the “Big Four” of IT infrastructure: computing, data network and security.

• Computing: Enterprises now require infrastructure that can support accelerated computing environments optimised for AI model training and inference, placing a significant strain on computing infrastructure due to the high volume of data they process and the complex models they run. Data centres are adapting to these needs by designing spaces that can accommodate dense compute environments and by offering flexible compute resources that support a wide range of AI applications, from real-time analytics to large-scale automation initiatives. Central to this changing landscape is the rapid evolution of GPU processors, which now serve as the core for AI, machine learning, and large language engine (LLE) workloads, which demand advanced power and cooling technologies due to their increasing performance and density.
• Data management: As indicated by a recent report by Digital Connexion, 52% of organisations surveyed reported struggling to extract actionable insights from their data due to fragmentation, which poses an issue as AI performs best on high-quality, well-organised data. Colocation can help address this challenge by centralising infrastructure within highly connected facilities, allowing enterprises to consolidate disparate data systems and reduce latency between applications.

• Network: As AI applications grow more complex, they rely on low-latency, high-bandwidth networks to function effectively, which enterprises are achieving by turning to colocation data centres that offer proximity to major network providers and direct on-ramps to public clouds. These centres allow businesses to place their infrastructure in environments engineered for speed, resilience, and scalability, reducing data transit times and enabling predictable performance and logical data routing and interconnect-rich architectures that further ensure that workloads can run efficiently, even as data volumes surge.
• Security: With AI integration into critical systems, the risk of cyberattacks has increased significantly, and Indian enterprises are responding by investing in zero-trust architectures, real-time threat monitoring, and advanced encryption. To support further, data centres are equipped with secure access control systems and are integrating security at every point of data entry and exit to ensure business continuity. 

Addressing the challenges of AI infrastructure

The major redesigning of the data centre industry,bprompted by the surge in demand for AI among Indian enterprises, has been a topic of a few concerns, such as environmental implications, latency issues, and slow scalability. As India sprints to the forefront of global AI innovation, these challenges beg for a timely resolution, which can keep the planet protected and the productivity of the nation’s enterprises uninterrupted. Recognising this responsibility, data centres are taking steps towards preventing these common challenges:

• Latency: To reduce latency, many businesses are moving their infrastructure into colocation data centres that offer direct connections to cloud providers and key networks. This setup shortens the path that data needs to travel, helping AI applications run faster and more reliably.
• Power consumption: AI systems consume significantly more energy than traditional IT applications, and in order to meet this incredible demand sustainably, data centres are integrating renewable energy sources, advanced direct contact cooling technologies like liquid cooling, and thermal management. Additionally, AI deployments require robust power distribution schemes, including more than two diverse power paths and distributed redundant power designs, to ensure continuous and reliable operation.
• Scalability: AI systems and their needs are growing rapidly, and infrastructure must be able to expand alongside these without disruption. Modular designs and cloud-like resource allocation models are helping data centres respond quickly to changes in demand and support both innovation and operational stability.

What lies ahead for Indian data centres?

With high adoption rates, a strong developer base, and growing institutional support, India is well-positioned to lead the next phase of global AI development. Data centres are at the very core of this opportunity, as their ability to provide secure, scalable, and intelligent infrastructure will define how well Indian enterprises can realise the full potential of AI.

Several promising developments are already underway, with cities like Navi Mumbai, Chennai, and Hyderabad seeing a rise in AI-ready data centres. Partnerships between government and industry are enabling faster build-outs of AI-ready infrastructure. As AI continues to evolve, the expectations placed on infrastructure will grow even further. Success will depend on how effectively organisations and data centres can respond to these expectations. The path forward lies in building data systems that are fast, secure, compliant, and ready to scale.