India’s data centre capacity has crossed 1.6 gigawatts, according to a Business Today report of 23 June 2026 that cites the Knight Frank India Data Centre Market Update. That is about five times the 296 megawatts of 2016, and the report says that more than 8.3 gigawatts of capacity are in the pipeline. Other search summaries give the live figure as about 1.7 gigawatts, so the exact number depends on the source and the date.
The capacity is concentrated in a few cities. Mumbai has 766.6 megawatts of live capacity, which is 47% of the national total, followed by Chennai with 191.5 megawatts, Delhi-NCR with 174.5, Hyderabad with 151.4 and Kolkata with 23.1. Bengaluru and Pune are also mentioned but without figures, and Visakhapatnam and Jamnagar are listed as places under development and not live.
Artificial intelligence is driving the new demand. The report says that AI accounted for 78% of data centre leasing in 2025, against 23% the year before. That change helps to explain why the planned projects are so much larger than the existing ones, since AI training needs dense clusters of GPUs and a lot of power.
The largest announced project is in Visakhapatnam. Google broke ground on its AI hub at Tarluvada in Andhra Pradesh on 28 April 2026, according to a Google Cloud press release, with partners AdaniConneX and Nxtra by Airtel. Officials present included Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and the state IT minister Nara Lokesh. The release calls it Google’s largest investment in India’s digital future to date, and describes a gigawatt-scale AI ecosystem.
The cost figure comes from other reports. Search summaries say that the investment is about $15 billion over five years from 2026 to 2030 for a 1-gigawatt campus, described as Google’s largest AI hub outside the United States, but the press release excerpt reviewed does not give a dollar amount, so the figure should be treated as reported and not confirmed here. The Business Today report also links AdaniConneX and Google to a $15 billion investment over five years.
Reliance is building in Jamnagar, Gujarat. The Business Today report describes a 1-gigawatt AI-focused campus, while search summaries say that the company plans to expand to 3 gigawatts with 120 megawatts expected online in the second half of 2026, with reported investments of $20 to 30 billion. The sources differ on both the capacity and the cost, and they come from lower-quality summaries, so they are reported here as plans.
The competition is crowded, according to search summaries. One says that Bharti Airtel, Reliance and Adani could control 35 to 40% of the market, citing Jefferies, and another says that Reliance and Adani have committed a combined $210 billion, a figure that could not be verified. These large numbers show ambition but are statements of intent, not spending that has taken place.
The pipeline raises a practical question about power and water. The Business Today report mentions power constraints as context but the version reviewed does not give data on them, and the sources do not describe how the new campuses will be supplied.
The data in the sources point to a market that is doubling in the next few years on paper, with AI as the main driver, and the real test is how much of the pipeline of 8.3 gigawatts is built and used.
Featured image: Server racks in a data centre (file photo; a stand-in image, not an Indian site). Photo by Carl Lender from Sunrise, USA, licensed under CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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