Yotta will be launching public cloud service by January 2024: CEO Sunil Gupta

Yotta Data Services, part of real estate developer Hiranandani group, is on an expansion spree. The Mumbai-based data center company set up in 2020, has established two data center parks in Mumbai and Noida and plans to expand to more locations - both in the domestic and international markets. TechCircle interviews Sunil Gupta, co-founder, managing director, and chief executive officer. Edited excerpts:

What are some of the major projects in the pipeline?

We are right now working on five more projects. We of two of these data center parks coming up in Mumbai in Powai and Chandiwali. Both these projects are two buildings each with about 67 MW of IT power, each. Besides this, we plan to launch a data center in GIFT City, Gujarat by October this year. We are building another data center park containing multiple buildings in Chennai, with the first of them slated to be live by October 2024.

We are also exploring markets beyond India. By July 2024, we will be launching a two-building campus of 30MW in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We feel there are markets in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, where still there's a whole lot of potential for growth. Like India, these markets have drivers like fast adoption of digitisation but corresponding capacities have not been created there.

Apart from large data center parks, we are also focusing on establishing edge data centers. With the rollout of 5G connection along with increased use cases of artificial intelligence, there is a huge need to have data processing at edge locations since the latency requirements are in microseconds. We already have edge data centers in tier–2 and -3 cities like Lucknow, Guwahati, Bhubaneshwar, Coimbatore, Indore, Nagpur, Jaipur, and Chandigarh. We plan to build a large number of these small-scale edge centers throughout the length and breadth of the country by either building them ground up or partnering with telecom operators already present at such locations.

Last year, you announced that Yotta will be launching a public cloud platform to take on the likes of AWS, Google Cloud. What is the status of the project?

Right from the time Yotta was established, our vision was to offer both colocation services, and manage cloud and IT services. Today we have more than 800 enterprise and government customers to whom not only we are giving colocation services, but also providing a full bouquet of cloud and security and managed IT services.

In this context, I announced last year that Yotta plans to launch a much larger cloud service based on the open-source software platform. The work is on and we are through with the lab testing phase. By October, we will be doing a beta launch of the service for select customers and by January 2024, we will do a full-fledged commercial launch. The idea behind launching a truly indigenous cloud service is to address data localisation concerns from companies and the government for sovereignty and security purposes.

In this platform, we will also have a multi-cloud orchestration layer that will help customers to sign into multiple cloud providers. It means that users will not only get to leverage Yotta cloud services but also services from providers like AWS or Microsoft Azure.

Speaking of data localisation, how will the newly established Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act impact the data center industry in the country?

Under DPDP Act, the government has proposed to prepare a list of countries where data will not be transferred. Apart from such countries, data can be freely hosted outside India as well. I believe this will also lead to a huge inflow of data back to India. The Act hints that in those geographies where the data from India can go, data from those geographies can flow into India very freely. For instance, currently, social media companies only have caching nodes in the country, but now they would be looking at having entire nodes in India. This gives the opportunity for the data center industry in India to grow by 5-7% by 2030.

In April, there were reports of ex-Intel executive Raja Koduri’s plans to acquire or partner with Yotta for his upcoming AI venture. Where does the deal stand as of today?

We were as much surprised about the report since we never had any such discussion. When we reached out to Raja Koduri, he clarified that many companies host their workloads, including GPU-based workloads, with Yotta, and he has been in touch with one such entity. He plans to sign a deal with that entity, not with Yotta.

How will the data center industry grow in India in the coming years?

The data center industry in India had only 200MW of total capacity till the early 2000s. This grew to 800MW between 2015 and 2022. By 2030, the capacity is expected to grow by 3000 MW 2030. There are tailwinds like 5G, AI, social media consumption, and digitalisation that are pushing a growth like that.

As per a market research firm DC Byte’s report, India already is the fourth largest data center in the data center market for the APAC region. And by 2027, it will become the largest.