Digital Connexion — a joint venture between Reliance Industries Ltd., Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., and Digital Realty Trust Inc. — has signed an agreement to invest $11 billion by 2030 to develop a large-scale AI-focused data center campus in southern India.
The project marks one of the country’s biggest moves yet in the rapidly expanding global data infrastructure race.
The company announced on Wednesday that it will build a 1 gigawatt AI-native data center campus on a 400-acre (1.6187 sq km) site in Visakhapatnam, located in Andhra Pradesh.
The agreement was formalised through a memorandum of understanding with the Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board.
The investment aligns with a worldwide surge in data center construction, driven by governments and corporations competing to meet the growing demand for AI compute capacity. Globally, trillions of dollars are being poured into such infrastructure as part of what has been described as an AI hardware arms race.
Visakhapatnam is emerging as a major hub for AI infrastructure. Last month, Alphabet Inc.’s Google unveiled plans to invest about $15 billion over the next five years to build an AI infrastructure hub in the city.
The Reliance joint venture joins several global technology companies — many of them US-based — that are accelerating investments in India.
Amazon has announced plans to invest $12.7 billion to expand its cloud infrastructure in the country by 2030. OpenAI is exploring the establishment of its own 1-gigawatt data center. Meanwhile, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) recently secured $1 billion from TPG Inc. to expand its AI data center capabilities.
India’s data center market is positioned for significant growth, with total investments expected to surpass $100 billion by 2027, according to estimates from CBRE Group Inc.