Equinix to acquire land at $9 million to set up datacentre in Chennai

Equinix has invested over $9 million to acquire land in Chennai spread across a total space of more than 5.5 acres on a long-term leasehold basis as part of its expansion and growth strategy in India.  

Equinix is providing what they call as interconnected services to its customers with these datacentres by leveraging their datacentre relationship with more than 10,000 global clients. Equinix, through its Equinix Fabric service enables any enterprise whom it serves globally, to interconnect with datacentre in India and subsequent carriers (using infrastructure of Equinix) without the need of such enterprises to embark on the datacentre journey from scratch in India (or any new market). Equinix Internet exchange platform, connects to all the carriers and through that platform, enterprises have the advantage of getting connected to all the carriers without having to go individually and connecting to any of these carriers. 

Talking about the Infrastructure status given to datacentres by the government, Manoj Paul, Managing Director, Equinix India said that infrastructure status given to datacentre represents a highly progressive measure to accelerate growth of digital infrastructure. This announcement is a recognition of the importance of datacentres and the need to boost financing required for this highly capital-intensive industry. Getting access to funds and long-term loans at a lower cost and from additional lenders like insurance and pension funds will be key. 

“This measure, along with the announcement of 5G spectrum sale for this year, will have a positive impact on the datacentre industry. Many sectors like education, finance, entertainment and e-commerce, as well as work from anywhere, are highly dependent on digital ecosystem, which will drive the demand for datacentres and digital infrastructure,” Paul added.

In 2021, Equinix entered India through the acquisition of two datacentres in Mumbai, named MB1 and MB2. The two datacentres in Mumbai are home to the digital infrastructure of numerous global organisations and provide a total of 1,350 cabinets. The company also launched a Global Center of Excellence (GCoE) in Bangalore in November last year.

With India’s geographical location advantage, existing and upcoming undersea cable links, access to skilled resources and a growing domestic demand, coupled with states like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh rolling out data centre incentive policies, and now with the infrastructure industry status, India is well positioned to grow as one of the most important hubs in South Asia and will play a key role in the global data centres market in the future, said Paul.

Lately, several companies have set up their data centres in India. Cyber security firm Sophos’ has opened its new data centre in Mumbai on Monday, which the company announced last month.

Yotta Infrastructure, a subsidiary of Hiranandani Group, is constructing two more data centres in the Greater Noida region from January 2022.

The two buildings will have a capacity of 30-megawatt load each and will begin operations by January 2024, the company said in a statement.

Yotta’s first building in the Greater Noida’s Data Centre park is still under construction since January 2021 and is expected to go live for customer operations by July 2022. Once completed, it will have a capacity of 30MW IT load.