Data Centres in India Infrastructure for the Digital Age

Key Highlights:

• Data centres are critical infrastructure powering India's digital economy, supporting banking, e-Governance, and online services.
• India's installed data centre power capacity is projected to expand from 1.57 GW (August 2026) to nearly 8 GW by 2030.
• The Union Budget 2022-23 granted infrastructure status to data centres by including them in the Harmonized List of Infrastructure.
• Government policies include a tax holiday for eligible foreign cloud service providers until 2047 and support through schemes like IndiaAI Mission.
• Sustainability is addressed through renewable energy promotion, the SHANTI Act, and BIS standards for efficiency like Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE).

Detailed Insights:

• Data centres provide essential computing, storage, and networking capabilities for the expanding digital services in India.
• The National Informatics Centre (NIC) has established National Data Centres and 37 State Data Centres to support government institutions.
• Significant investments of USD 70 billion are underway in the sector, with an additional USD 90 billion in announced projects.
• Infrastructure status facilitates easier access to long-term credit, supporting investment and expansion of data centre capacity.
• The SHANTI Act (Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Act) supports reliable nuclear power for emerging sectors like AI and data centres.
• The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has developed standards for data centre efficiency, including Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and Cooling Efficiency Ratio (CER).
• The Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) has notified codes like Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) 2017 and Energy Conservation and Sustainable Building Code (ECSBC) 2024 for energy and water conservation.
• Advanced cooling technologies such as direct-to-chip liquid cooling and immersion cooling are being adopted to enhance resource efficiency in data centres.

Scientific/Technical Concepts Involved:

• Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): A metric indicating how efficiently a data centre uses energy, calculated as total facility power divided by IT equipment power.
• Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE): A metric quantifying the amount of water used by a data centre for cooling and other operations per unit of IT energy.
• Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE): A metric measuring the total carbon emissions from a data centre relative to its IT energy consumption.
• Virtualization: A technology that allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single physical server, optimizing resource utilization and efficiency.