By Ankit Goel, Founder, Constl & Chairman and Founder, Space World Group
The digital landscape has undergone a fundamental shift and there is no going back. AI workloads, real-time applications, large-scale automation, and hyperscale deployments have collectively triggered an explosion in digital consumption. Today’s applications are complex, performance-driven, and place extreme demands on the infrastructure beneath them. That infrastructure must scale at the same pace, or the entire digital economy will struggle to keep up.
At the centre of this requirement sits the data centre ecosystem, the foundational layer that stores, processes, and serves the applications powering India’s growing digital economy. The numbers alone reflect the pace of growth. India’s data centre capacity has expanded from approximately 375 MW in 2020 to over 1,500 MW in 2025, with estimates pointing toward 13 GW by 2030. Our nation is not merely participating in the global data centre boom; it is emerging as one of the key growth markets for data centre investment.
Hyperscalers are backing with their Capital
The confidence of global hyperscalers further underscores India’s strategic importance. AWS has committed $12.7 billion to cloud and AI infrastructure in India. Google has announced an approximately $15 billion investment over 2026–2030, extending beyond data centre development and strengthening
India’s global connectivity landscape. These are long-term investments undertaken by companies that deploy capital only where they see strong and sustained future demand.
The geographic spread of this growth is equally significant. Data centre hubs are moving beyond the established Tier 1 markets of Mumbai and Chennai into Tier 2 cities bringing compute capacity closer to emerging user bases while creating more cost-efficient opportunities for data centre providers. This shift shows that India’s data centre market is not just growing rapidly, but also becoming more mature and widespread.
The Question that the Data Centre Boom Cannot Afford to Ignore
Yet the data centre boom in India raises an urgent question that deserves more attention: what does it take to keep these facilities truly alive, connected, and performant? A data centre is not a standalone asset. It is a critical node in a larger digital ecosystem, and its functionality is highly dependent on how well it is interconnected with other facilities.
Real-time AI applications, cloud-native workloads, and IoT deployments at scale all require data centres to exchange massive volumes of data at exponentially high speeds and and consistently low latencies over a purpose-built connectivity fabric capable of supporting these requirements. The performance bar is not set by what legacy networks can deliver, it is now set by what AI-era applications demand. And those demands are categorically different from the consumer broadband, basic backhaul, and traditional enterprise use cases that India’s existing fibre infrastructure was built to serve.
Why Legacy Fibre Cannot Close the Gap?
Much of India’s fibre backbone was laid 20 to 25 years ago designed for reach and capacity rather than the high-performance demands of Data Centre Interconnectivity (DCI) and AI workloads. Existing digital infrastructure does not support the bandwidth, latency, and reliability standards that hyperscale and AI-grade connectivity requires.
Incremental upgrades to legacy networks will not bridge this gap. The requirements of DCI differ significantly from what those networks were designed to deliver. What this moment calls for is a new category of connectivity infrastructure – greenfield fibre networks engineered specifically for the high-performance, scalability, and resilience requirements of DCI, AI, and hyperscale workloads – not retrofitted from legacy fibre infrastructure.
Building the Connectivity Foundation for India’s AI Future
The next phase of India’s digital infrastructure journey will require a clear shift from legacy network thinking to purpose-built connectivity designed for the AI and data centre era. As data centres become larger, more distributed, and increasingly AI-driven, the networks connecting them must be engineered with express routes between key data centre hubs, terabit-scale bandwidth, and the capacity to support future growth. At the same time, redundancy, route diversity, and uninterrupted availability must be embedded into the network design from the outset to ensure resilience at scale.
As India advances its digital and AI ambitions, it is essential to recognize that the success of this ecosystem will depend not only on increasing compute capacity, but equally on the strength and capability of the digital infrastructure that connects and powers them. The future of India’s digital economy will be shaped by how effectively its connectivity layer is engineered to meet the scale, performance, and resilience demands of the AI era.