Mumbai adds 4MW to net data centre capacity, over 75% yet to go live

Mumbai added 4MW in its overall data centre capacity in the first three months of 2022, marking an increase of around 2% in available data centre capacity in the city. With this addition, Mumbai’s net data centre capacity increased to 885.2MW, of which nearly 77% remains either under construction or are yet to be commissioned, according to real estate consultancy Knight Frank’s quarterly data centre market report for Asia Pacific published earlier today.

The growth in available data centre capacity in Mumbai, India’s biggest data centre market, has been slower than Asia Pacific (APAC)’s growth in live data centre capacity in Q1 2022, the Knight Frank report added. A total of 488MW in data centre capacity was added to APAC markets in Q1 2022, bringing its net available data centre capacity up to over 8.7GW as of March 2022. The increase marked a rise of over 5% in available data centre capacities in the Asian markets.

The total data centre capacity of a market is calculated as a total of available data centre facilities, in-construction ones and those that are yet to be commissioned. The latter is referred to as ‘phased’ data centre capacity, and includes data centres that have already been purchased by companies in terms of their capacities – but have not been commissioned to be built yet.

Shishir Baijal, chairman and managing director of Knight Frank India, said that over half of Mumbai’s total data centre capacity is phased. Including this capacity, Mumbai ranks as the fifth largest city in the APAC region in terms of its total data centre capacity. Tokyo, Shanghai and Sydney are the only three cities in APAC that have gigawatt-class data centre capacities.

Baijal added that the introduction of India’s upcoming Data Protection Bill, which is expected to define data localisation norms for the country, would “dictate market volumes” once it is formally adopted and brought into effect. The Bill could spur conversion of phased data centres in India and add to the available capacity in the country.