AirTrunk commits $30 billion to build 5 GW of AI data centers in India

AirTrunk, the Blackstone-backed data center operator, said Thursday it will invest $30 billion in India by 2030, adding to a wave of commitments from technology and infrastructure groups seeking to expand computing capacity in the country.

The Australian company said it will develop 5 gigawatts of new data center capacity in India, one of the largest commitments to the digital infrastructure sector in the South Asian country. AirTrunk entered India earlier this year through the acquisition of Lumina CloudInfra.

AirTrunk’s commitment underscores India’s growing attractiveness as a destination for AI infrastructure, as technology companies and investors seek new geographies to expand computing power. The country’s data center capacity is expected to rise to as much as 8 gigawatts by 2030 from about 1.5 gigawatts today, according to research firm Bernstein.

The Indian government has also taken steps to attract investment in AI infrastructure. Earlier this year, New Delhi offered foreign cloud providers tax breaks until 2047 on services sold abroad if those workloads were run from Indian data centers.

AirTrunk has already started laying the foundation for its expansion in the country. Earlier this week, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said in a post on X that the western Indian state had exchanged a letter of intent to allocate land at the Raigad Pen Growth Centre, where AirTrunk plans to set up a 3 GW data center that involves an investment of about INR 2 trillion (about $21 billion). The company already has a development pipeline of around 600 MW across Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad.

AirTrunk did not respond to questions about whether the proposed Raigad project would account for most of the planned 5 GW capacity, or whether it plans additional developments elsewhere in India.

The announcement comes after a meeting between AirTrunk CEO Robin Khuda and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said in a post on X that the planned investment will help strengthen India’s position as a global hub for cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

AirTrunk joins a growing list of companies investing in infrastructure in the country. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Uber have announced major investments in cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence, while Indian companies Reliance Industries, Adani Group and TCS have made ambitious plans to expand data center capacity.

However, data centers require huge amounts of electricity, water and land, and industry executives and analysts have pointed to resource issues as a potential bottleneck, particularly with regard to energy.

Deloitte estimates that building data centers in the Asia-Pacific region could require tens of terawatt-hours of additional electricity by the end of the decade.

AirTrunk’s investment thesis is based on government support, a large pool of tech talent, and access to renewable energy, Khoda said.