Airtel invested Rs 3.3 lakh cr in past decade: Mittal

NEW DELHI: After investing over Rs 3.3 lakh crore in building digital infrastructure in the past decade, Bharti Airtel is betting big on financial services, data centres, and cloud for the next phase of growth, chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said in its annual report.

Bharti Airtel has announced Rs 20,000-crore investment in non-banking financial company

Airtel Money while its data centre Nxtra recently raised $1 billion (about Rs 9,500 crore) as part of its plan to build 1 gigawatt capacity.

“Over the last few years, we took a calibrated approach to build new growth engines for Airtel. These bold bets yielded strong outcomes and have grown our conviction in three adjacencies where we believe Airtel has a clear right to win - financial services, data centres and Airtel Cloud,” Mittal has said.

He said Airtel Money was granted the approval from the Reserve Bank of India to operate as a non-deposit taking Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC). “Airtel Money will be suitably capitalised over the years,” Mittal said.

He said Nxtra is on track to build 1 GW of capacity over the next few years driven by demand from India’s rapid digitisation, rising cloud adoption and increasing data localisation requirements. “Our third growth engine, Airtel Cloud, is seeing encouraging early traction,” he added..