Chennai in PDG’s plan to set up data centres

NEW DELHI: As the data centre industry gains momentum in India, Asia’s leading data centre provider Princeton Digital Group (PDG) has said it is expanding its footprint in the country to let more Indian firms store data locally in safe environments.

The Singapore-headquartered PDG has opened its flagship data centre called ‘MU1’ in Navi Mumbai that will provide 48 MW of critical IT capacity.

Vipin Shirsat, GM, India, PDG said the company is here to solve regulatory, cultural and infrastructural challenges as it builds state-of-the-art data centres.

“India is a key market for us, and with our Navi Mumbai data centre becoming operational, we are exploring to expand to (other) cities, including Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune. Each of these data centres will be of 48 MW capacity with over $300 million investment,” he said, without disclosing the timeline.

The data centres would cater to more Indian enterprises especially in the fields of core banking, digital payments and content,” he said.

With a project investment of $300 million, MU1 is built across six acres within a larger IT campus at Airoli, Navi Mumbai.

The campus will deliver secure and scalable data centre capacity to hyperscalers - large cloud, content, commerce and fintech companies.

According to Shirsat, “the significant rise of data generation and use across a variety of industries has led to a rise in demand for data servers and data centres in the country.”

With over a billion mobile phones and more than 700 million Internet subscribers, India has witnessed exponential growth in digital commerce, digital entertainment and the use of social media.

The size of the digital economy in India is estimated to grow from $200 billion in 2017-18 to a staggering $1 trillion by 2025.