Techno Digital to Invest $1 Billion to Build 250 MW Data Centre Capacity Along with the large-format ones, it plans to build 100 edge data centres in next 4-5 years to create a hub and spoke model
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Techno Digital, the data centre arm of BSE-listed Techno Electric and Engineering Company Ltd., aims to invest close to USD 1 billion to expand its total data centre capacity to up to 250 MW by 2030-32. This will be a combination of large-scale and edge data centres.
"Data center consumes a lot of power and with our understanding of the power sector, we can add value in the sector by sourcing sustainable power at the right price and ensuring that we source it in a manner which ensures reliability in power supply…additionally, we are an EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) and through our parent company, we are doing some generation and transmission projects," Ankit Saraiya, Director and CEO, Techno Digital told Entrepreneur India.
In that context, Techno Digital launched its first data centre in Chennai in August this year with a capacity of 36 MW. It has planned another 14 MW centre in Kolkata to be operational by the end of 2027.
"Our Chennai project is quite unique in its own way where we have truly showcased our EPC and power capabilities. I would say getting two 110 KV feeders in Tamil Nadu is a challenge. We have got sanction of almost 10.1 MW, which is the live connected load today. We have our own in-house 110 KV substation which many data centers struggle with. Additionally, this is the first data center possibly in Chennai or in Tamil Nadu, which is completely water cooled," said Saraiya.
Recently, Techno Digital has bagged two tenders from RailTel Corporation to develop edge data centers. "It is under a revenue share model on a 20 plus 5-year extendable contract where the land is being given to us by RailTel from the Ministry of Railways and we are developing these edge data centers in 102 cities across India," said Saraiya.
"What we are largely trying to do is create interconnected edge data centres on railways optical fibre network. RailTel almost owns 70,000 odd kilometres of optical fibre across India wherein they have laid these underground optical fibre parallel to the railway tracks and we are using that network to create an interconnected mesh of 100 of these edge data centres across India. We have already commissioned our first one in Gurugram with a capacity of 200-250 KW," said Saraiya.
A second edge data centre of 500 KW in under construction in Mumbai and a third one is under progress for which land is expected to be allotted in a tier-II city to start construction soon. "The idea is in the next 4-5 years; we should develop approximately 100 of these edge data centers," said Saraiya.
In terms of its target sectors, apart from the hyperscalers, government is a key focus area for Techno Digital. "Today, the government is possibly not even consuming 10 per cent of the entire cloud capacity within the country. But as digitization efforts increase and governance and other citizen-centric services get digitized, this 10 per cent is bound to increase to at least 20-25 per cent over the next 5-7 years," said Saraiya.
On expansion strategy, Saraiya said that the company will take a balanced approach with a mix of tier-I, -II, and -III cities. "Tier-I because that is where the core consumption of data or the per capita consumption of data is the highest. But when it comes to serving hyperscalers, our approach is going to be very different. We are not going to come as a data center operator per se, but we are going to come as an infrastructure player over there where we can do a large scale data park," said Saraiya.
