Hyderabad-based CtrlS Datacenters announces $2 billion investment plan

Hyderabad-headquartered CtrlS Datacenters, on Thursday, announced its new investment plan of $2 billion (about ₹16,600 crore) over the next six years.  

As part of its investment plan, the company said that it plans to double headcount by 2029 and is expected to hire over 1,000 people in the next six years, with an emphasis on “constantly hiring and skilling”.  

The announcement comes weeks after the company appointed banking technology veteran Mohit Pande as its Chief Financial Officer (CFO), who joined from Jefferies. Last month, CtrlS also appointed Amazon Web Services (AWS) veteran Vipin Jain as President to lead the company's data center operations. In recent months, the company also onboarded other industry veterans from global MNCs, including Royce Thomas from Equinix, who joined as President & Chief Business Officer, ex-Google executive Ashish Ahuja as chief technology officer (CTO), besides other senior leaders.   

In a statement, CtrlS also said, the company also announced its plan to add 350 MW of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-ready hyperscale datacenters, as the company sees the demand for AI and cloud ready datacenters is on the rise. This announcement is also part of its new investments plan. 

“CtrlS Datacenters will invest in several key technologies and strategies in areas such as advanced cooling, power management, and overall infrastructure design in its new hyperscale datacenters, including liquid cooling (direct-to-chip or immersion cooling), AI HVAC, AI optimised rack layout, high-efficiency power infrastructure etc., and will provide a plug-n-play environment for emerging technology service providers to grow their IT footprint seamlessly. 

At present, CtrlS Datacenters has 12 state-of-the-art datacenters with 234 MW capacity spread across seven major cities including Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Noida, Lucknow, and Patna. The investment plan involves the addition of approximately 350 MW capacity across new and existing hyperscale and edge datacenters in both India and select Southeast Asian markets.  

The company further outlined its plans to achieve Net Zero or Carbon Neutral by 2030 for which is investing in 153-Megawatt Peak (MWp) solar projects across three markets, that will generate 2,50,000-Megawatt Hours (MWh) energy annually. The company will further enhance its water conservation measures by deploying more advanced water recycling technologies in line with its goal of 100 per cent usage of recycled water at all of its datacenters, it said, adding that by 2025, CtrlS plans to invest in additional 300 MWp projects. 

“We aspire to not only bolster our presence across key markets delivering the next generation of datacenter technology, but also to elevate the standard for the entire datacenter industry through pioneering services and sustainable practices,” Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder & Chairman of CtrlS Datacenters, said in a statement.  

CtrlS, founded in 2007, is a tier-4 data centre is built to be completely fault tolerant and has redundancy for every component with an expected uptime of 99.995% (26.3 minutes of downtime annually).