Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Sept.30: Bharti Airtel announced today that it will invest 50 billion rupees ($673 million) in its data centre operations expansion to meet customer demand in and around India.
According to Airtel Business Chief Ajay Chitkara, the company’s Nxtra unit will invest by 2025, with plans to establish a data centre economy across 80 Indian cities, bringing the total installed capacity to more than 400 MW.
“There is a huge potential and huge demand (for data centres) which is expected in the next three to four years’ time,” Mr Chitkara said in a virtual press conference.
Nxtra presently operates 10 big data centres and 120 edge data centres, or smaller data processing facilities, across India, as part of a telco plan to diversify revenue streams and attract enterprise clients who traditionally offer higher margins. Traditional voice providers are seeing increased competition from free calls on apps like Facebook’s WhatsApp and Signal, according to the business strategy.
Mukesh Ambani’s company Reliance Jio, an opponent of Airtel, collaborated with Microsoft in 2019 to develop data centres across India, and with Google this year to bolster its enterprise and consumer products as it prepares to introduce 5G services. Separately, Airtel announced that Nxtra will boost its use of green energy in its data centres, with the goal of sourcing 50% of its power needs from renewable sources.
