NTT announced a $2 billion capex to drive data centre space, networks and solar projects in the country over the next three years
NTT is focusing more on the data centre space where it leads the market, getting three-fourths of the committed $2 billion capex, which will see it nearly double the capacity to 2.5 million sq. ft. The firm has integrated its three India units into one entity from January this year, said a senior official of the Japanese technology services major. By merging the three businesses, NTT India, NTT Communications India, and NTT-Netmagic, the company was created in India on January 1, 2021 under the leadership of Sharad Sanghi as the chief executive, following an announcement to this effect in November last year.
To drive the data centre space, networks and solar projects in the country over the next three years, NTT also had announced a $2 billion capex.
Sanghi, before the new role was the chief executive of NTT-Netmagic, also known as Global Data Centres and Cloud Infrastructure India.
Operational already in four cities with over 1.5 million sqft across 10 data centres, the firm is the largest operator in data centre space segment and Sanghi says this will more than double to 2.5 million sq. ft. over the next three years and will be entering four more cities.
Data centre space will be the focus of the company going forward. Accordingly, over the next three years, the company will be launching six more data centre parks, out of which three are under construction in Mhape and Airoli, both of which are in Navi Mumbai and in Chandivali in Mumbai and one each will be come up in Chennai, Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru.
Over the next three years, the expansion will see up investing almost $1.5 billion of the committed $ 2 billion capex and will nearly double our capacity from 1.5 million sq. ft. to over 2.5 million sq. ft., Sanghi told in a weekend interaction.
The firm is waiting for demand to really firm up to Hyderabad and Pune, he said.
In Navi Mumbai, NTT also runs the first and the largest operational hyper scale data centre space park.
The rest of the capex will be used for power and managed services spaces. To the tune of $400 million to scale up our green power generation capacity from 150MW now to 250MW, the renewal power sector will get the second biggest capex, Sanghi said.
The remaining $100 million will be used for building new undersea cable landing ports in Chennai, Mumbai and Khandala in Gujarat, he added.
Sanghi said the domestic data centre space market is growing at an annual rate of 20 per cent and will continue to clip at this level for the next few years more. Currently, India is the fifth largest data centre space market in the world that is led by China, but India’s capacity is only a sixth of China’s.
Refusing to share any revenue figure, pointing to the fact that they are privately held, Sanghi said as of now, data centre space business is the second largest in terms of revenue but has the highest margin and is also the fastest growing business for them, after the managed services business in the technology infra space, and the network unit the last.
But with after the expansion, data centre space will be the biggest business unit both in term of top line as well as bottom line, he said.
The company in India employs over 6,500, he said, and added that the business integration did not lead to any firing.
Also read: Transformation of BFSI industry with cloud and AI combo
Do Follow: CIO News LinkedIn Account | CIO News Facebook | CIO News Youtube | CIO News Twitter
