Yotta plans indigenous cloud platform to take on AWS, Microsoft

Mumbai-based Hiranandani Group’s data centre arm, Yotta Infrastructure, is looking to take on global giants like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft with its own cloud platform. In an interview, Sunil Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of Yotta, told Mint that the company is currently beta testing its own cloud hosting platform, and aims to offer the service to small businesses and government organizations in India.

“We are looking for all-round indigenization in our business. Alongside offering large data center facilities, we are presently in the beta testing phase of developing our own cloud hosting platform,” Gupta said.

Globally, cloud hosting, analytics and services are led by US-based Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Service providers, including Yotta itself, offer various tools on top of these cloud services — such as cyber security, data analytics, and others.

“Our goal is to offer a homegrown cloud hosting platform for small business and government organizations, while offering shared server rack space to the global giants,” he added.

On Monday, Yotta announced plans to invest ₹39,000 crore to build data center and IT service infrastructure in Uttar Pradesh over the next seven years. The company also unveiled its first hyperscale data center park in the National Capital Region, built at a cost of ₹1,500 crore.

Hyperscale data centers are large units that house tens of thousands of servers, and handle critical network functions and compute for companies. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft’s Azure lead the industry in India and worldwide.

Located in Greater Noida, the facility will eventually feature 160 megawatt (MW) of information technology (IT) server capacity — with the first seven-floor facility offering 28.8MW capacity at the moment.

The executive also added that Yotta has entered a partnership with state-run telecom operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). Under this partnership, which will be officially announced in the coming weeks, Yotta is converting the telco’s infrastructures and buildings across the country into edge data center facilities.

“We’ve already begun work on seven such facilities, in a bid to build a large edge data center network,” Gupta added.

In February this year, union minister of state for IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, said that India had 500MW of live data center capacity — which the union government expects to increase to 3,000MW FY27.

The government’s estimate can have an impact on the supply chain of IT services as well. On October 19, Santhosh Viswanathan, managing director of chipmaker Intel India, told Mint that the domestic data center market accounts for only 2% of the global data center capacity.

“Once data centers in India start building up capacity to meet consumer demand, the market will make a stronger business sense for chip and other component suppliers as well, in the country,” Viswanathan said.

Yotta’s Gupta concurred, adding that the company expects increasing demand for data center infrastructure in the coming years. “We are already constructing the next two data center buildings as part of our Greater Noida facility, each of which will add 33.6MW of server capacity to the park. We’re also working on adding 56 new edge data center facilities across localized markets to address the upcoming demand. In the East, we have already procured land in Kolkata, and work on a hyperscaler facility will begin on the same in the coming quarters,” Gupta said.

On September 27, a market study by real estate research firm JLL India said that India’s planned and live data center capacity should reach 1318MW by end-2024. Additionally, large hyperscaler data center facilities, such as Yotta’s Greater Noida park, should help diversify India’s region-wise data center density as well.

The report said that as of this year, more than three-fourths of India’s data center capacity is concentrated in Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru.

“You need to diversify such a density of data centers, since with the advent of artificial intelligence tasks, mixed reality and 5G, it will be important to offer low latency services. In such a scenario, edge data centers will be key to caching content — which would help enable the next generation of enterprise and consumer content services,” Gupta added.