India’s data centre market is rapidly transitioning from potential to performance, and Singapore-based CapitaLand Investment is positioning itself at the forefront of this transformation. The real estate and infrastructure major is developing a 245 MW data centre portfolio across Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bengaluru with a $1 billion investment, and plans to double its capacity to nearly 500 MW by the end of the decade — underscoring India’s rise as one of the fastest-growing digital infrastructure hubs globally.

“The company began acquiring land in mid-2021, during the COVID-19 period, and effectively started development in 2022. The current expansion pipeline, worth about $1 billion, is progressing in phases and is expected to be completed by 2027. We aim to almost double our footprint to nearly 500 MW by 2028-2030,” said Surajit Chatterjee, Managing Director and Head, Data Centre, India, CapitaLand Investment, in an exclusive interview with Moneycontrol recently.

The market has become very mature, and the company now have three-to-five-year visibility that allows us to plan capital and deployment efficiently.”

He said that India’s data economy is booming on the back of hyperscaler demand from global cloud service providers. These firms, which often require 100 MW or more at short notice, are driving a new scale of infrastructure investment.

“We’ve seen demand increase by 10–15 percent quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) in both hyperscaler and enterprise segments,” he said. Around 70 percent of the company’s revenue in India comes from hyperscalers and 30 percent from large enterprises.

Chatterjee said that CapitaLand is currently developing 245 MW across four sites and plans to add another 250 MW by 2028–2030, primarily in Mumbai and Hyderabad, the country’s fastest-growing markets.

“Mumbai will happen first, followed by Hyderabad. We are building campus-style setups because hyperscalers today want multi-building complexes, not single towers,” he said.

Chatterjee said that the CapitaLand is not looking for any joint ventures to fuel its expansion plans.

“While several competitors have entered joint ventures — Brookfield with Digital Realty, Adani with H Connect, and Blackstone with Lumina— CapitaLand is steering clear of JVs. We do not need to do JVs. In every JV, one partner brings real estate and the other operations. CapitaLand has both capabilities in-house, which gives us speed and flexibility,” he said.