Airtel owned Nxtra starts work on hyperscale data centre in Kolkata

Bharti Airtel subsidiary Nxtra Data Ltd has started construction of a new hyperscale data center facility with 25MW capacity in Kolkata to cater to cloud requirements of organizations in the underserved east, northeast region along with adjoining SAARC countries. Nxtra said it will invest Rs 600 crore in the new data center, which will be its biggest in the eastern region. The Airtel company currently has 12 large and 120 Edge facilities across India. 

A hyperscale is a large data center with thousands of servers to distribute workloads and scale up capacity when required to handle large volumes of data. 

Nxtra said that the new data center will use clean energy for operations and will be up and running by 2024. Nxtra has committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2031 and has partnered with multiple organizations to source renewable energy worth over 180,000 MWh. For instance, in September, Nxtra announced that it is partnering with Bloom Energy to use hydrogen-based fuel cells to supply power to its data center in Karnataka. 

Power consumption by data centers is a major environmental concern, which is why service providers like Nxtra are exploring renewable sources of energy. According to a September report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), global data center electricity consumption in 2021 was 220-320 TWh2, which accounts for around 0.9-1.3% of global electricity demand.  

Further, Nxtra said it is planning to invest over Rs 5000 crore over the next four years to expand its data center capacity by 3x to over 400MW. 

“The new facility will be the gateway to serving customers in and around the eastern region and the SAARC countries. We are investing extensively in green energy and our carrier-neutral, hyper-scale Kolkata data center will run on renewable sources of energy,” Rajesh Tapadia, executive director and chief operating officer at Nxtra said in a statement. 

Backed by Carlyle Group, Nxtra is one of the leading data center network providers in India. Its customers include enterprises, hyperscalers, startups, SMEs, and governments. 

India’s data center capacity is expected to grow from 870 MW in the last fiscal to 1,700-1,800 MW by FY 2025, according to a CRISIL Ratings report from August. The report attributed the growth to the data boom, digital adoption, and data localization laws in India.