Digital Realty, Brookfield to form India data centre venture
Digital Realty, the largest global provider of cloud-and-carrier-neutral data centre, colocation, and interconnection solutions, has today announced it will establish a joint venture with Brookfield Infrastructure to own, develop, and operate institutional quality data centres in India under the brand name, BAM Digital Realty.
The company says that the partnership will enable the expansion of its premier global data centre platform, PlatformDIGITAL, which supports the evolving data, control, and networking demands of global enterprises.
Discussing the joint venture between the two companies, Mark Smith, Managing Director, APAC for Digital Realty, said: "Today's collaboration marks the beginning of a new chapter for Digital Realty's operations, customers, and partners in Asia Pacific. India is on the cusp of rapid digitisation of services to support the country's economic growth.
"PlatformDIGITAL will offer our new and existing customers a consistent deployment model for extending their operations into India, providing fit-for-purpose infrastructure that will enable them to scale their digital business into one of the fastest-growing data markets in the world”, he added.
India’s growing data centre market
India has a population of over 1.4bn people and has the world's fifth-largest economy in terms of GDP. Couple this with an expanding focus on the digital delivery of services, India represents a key market opportunity to extend coverage, capacity, and connectivity options for the world's leading service providers as well as local and global enterprise customers. India’s data centre demand is expected to increase significantly, being driven by rapidly growing data consumption, digitisation of the economy, the onset of 5G, and data localisation trends.
Commenting on the market, A William Stein, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Investment Officer of Digital Realty, said: "India is a rapidly emerging data center market and offers a bright future, with accelerating adoption of digital business models among a population that recognizes the role of technology for future economic development. Our existing partnership with Brookfield, our Ascenty platform across Latin America, has already delivered long-term value to our customers, with over 250 megawatts of IT load capacity in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico either fully built out or currently under construction.
The deployment of PlatformDIGITAL
Digital Realty claims that once deployed, its data centre platform, PlatformDIGITAL, is expected to enable customers to rapidly scale digital transformation through the deployment of critical infrastructure.
According to the company, data centres developed in India will leverage Digital Realty’s industry-leading, energy-efficient data centre design and operating procedures and highly repeatable Pervasive Data Center Architecture (PDx) in preparation for the new digital workplace.
The joint venture will also aim to expand Brookfield Infrastructure's significant global data infrastructure portfolio, which currently includes US$23bn in assets across data transmission, distribution, and storage, and includes a portfolio of 139,000 operational telecom wireless towers in India, expected to “expand to 175,000 over the near term”, Digital Realty claims.
Expressing enthusiasm for the collaboration, Arpit Agrawal, Managing Director and Head of India & Middle East, Brookfield Infrastructure, said: "We are pleased to further expand both our partnership with Digital Realty and our presence in India through this joint venture.
He added that “through the development of a high-quality, multi-city, India-focused data center platform, we believe BAM Digital Realty is well-positioned to play a meaningful role in addressing the large and growing data demand in the country and to offer a differentiated solution to customers”.
The BAM Digital Realty venture plans to acquire land parcels in multiple Indian metros for the development of data centre campuses. This aims to support the needs of global hyperscale service providers as well as international and local enterprises. The joint venture expects to design, build and operate sustainable facilities, drawing upon the firms' broader commitments to sustainable operations, including carbon reduction initiatives.
The joint venture is expected to be finalised in the second half of 2021, subject to closing conditions and regulatory approval.
