By Kapil Joshi, CEO of IT Staffing, Quess Corp
India’s data center market is on a strong growth trajectory. With the market projected to expand from $5.55 billion in 2025 to $13.11 billion by 2034, and close to $90 billion in announced investments, the infrastructure and capital commitments are firmly in place. Hyperscalers, who today contribute nearly 70% of new builds, are scaling aggressively, AI campuses are being announced, and regulated sectors like BFSI and government are driving consistent backend demand. The scale of India’s digital economy, over 950 million internet users and nearly 19.47 billion monthly UPI transactions, is creating structural, long-term demand for data center capacity that goes well beyond a cyclical growth phase. We are also on track to grow from 276 operational facilities today to over 450, which gives a sense of the pace at which this ecosystem is expanding.
Capability Is the Next Frontier
The data center ecosystem today employs between 86,000 and 90,000 professionals across more than 50 providers. That workforce is growing, and the opportunity ahead is significant. However, in the functions most central to running hyperscale infrastructure, namely IT Operations, AI Operations, and Facilities Engineering, demand is materially outpacing available supply. IT Operations is seeing demand at 35% against a supply of 16%, and AI Operations is in a similar position, with demand at 30% running against a supply of 14%.
What makes this a particularly important moment is that AI is simultaneously reshaping what these roles require. The infrastructure being built today needs people who understand cloud-native environments, automation, AIOps, and AI infrastructure management, skillsets that are still developing in the market. As AI workloads are expected to account for approximately 30% of deployed capacity by end of 2026, the industry has a clear window to get ahead of this and invest in building the right capability now.
The Skills Shift Is Real and Accelerating
Cloud and DevOps roles and Security and Compliance roles are each projected to grow 133% by 2029. That scale of growth reflects a structural shift, not a cyclical hiring spike. Infrastructure is increasingly being built using code, managed through container platforms, and governed by compliance frameworks driven by data localisation mandates and evolving regulations like DPDP.
As a result, roles such as Site Reliability Engineers, MLOps engineers, and cloud architects are becoming central to how infrastructure is operated day to day. Skills in Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, and multi-cloud orchestration are increasingly foundational to the work, and organisations investing in building this depth now will be better positioned as the ecosystem scales.
At the same time, physical infrastructure skills deserve equal attention. Energy already accounts for 30% to 50% of total data center operating expenditure, and as AI workloads drive higher rack density and power consumption, the economics of facilities management become even more consequential. Cooling, power systems, and electrical engineering roles are set to more than double by 2029. Facilities engineering roles are often underrepresented in talent planning conversations, but they are foundational to whether hyperscale infrastructure can operate at the reliability and efficiency levels the market demands. Giving this side of the workforce equation equal attention will be important to sustaining the overall pace of growth.
Looking Beyond the Metros
Today, a large share of India’s data center infrastructure and talent is concentrated in a handful of cities. Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Navi Mumbai together account for nearly 59% of all facilities, and talent distribution closely follows this pattern. That concentration reflects where the ecosystem matured first, and these cities will continue to be the core of India’s digital infrastructure.
What is encouraging is that Tier-2 markets are projected to grow from 7% of total infrastructure share today to 35% by 2030, offering meaningful cost advantages over Tier-1 cities. This geographic expansion opens up a real opportunity to develop new talent corridors alongside new infrastructure. Getting ahead of this by building skilling and hiring pipelines in these emerging locations is both a practical necessity and a strategic advantage for organisations that move early.
The Strategic Priority for This Decade
India’s data center growth is well-capitalised and strategically important for the country’s digital ambitions. The focus now is ensuring that workforce capability scales alongside infrastructure capacity. That means moving from reactive hiring to longer-term capability planning, investing in skilling across both technical and facilities domains, and building talent pipelines that extend well beyond the established metro clusters.
The next decade will not be defined solely by how much capacity India builds. It will equally be defined by how effectively the ecosystem develops the people who operate it.