IT and business services company will invest $500 million in India over the next 12-18 months for accelerated AI platforms, growing data centre bandwidth, sub-sea cable expansion and to address financial sector’s demand for sovereign cloud.
“We have invested about $3 billion in India since 2007. That is a combination of investments in data centres and some buyouts. Now, we will invest another $500 million in India over the next year or so. A major portion of that will go into the data centres, but we are also focusing on building campuses, growing employee base, developing our innovation centre in Bengaluru. We also see a requirement most of the time from the financial institutions to have their own on-premises sovereign cloud,” Avinash Joshi, CEO of NTT Data India, told businessline.
Speaking about data centre capacities, Joshi said that India currently had about 16 NTT campuses with three new campuses opening up in Kolkata, Bengaluru and Navi Mumbai. The installed capacity of these campuses is 290 megawatt (MW) for IT facilities with plans to add another 210 MW capacity in the next two-three years. He also spoke about directing the investment to meet a growing requirement from financial institutions for a sovereign cloud over storing critical data in a public cloud.
MIS Transit cable
On submarine cable infrastructure, NTT DATA said it will commission the expansion of its Malaysia, India, Singapore Transit (MIST) submarine cable system by June 2025. This is an 8,100-km cable that can carry over 200 terabits per second (Tbps). One of the largest cables in Asia, it will connect Malaysia, India, Singapore and Thailand. Joshi said that some portion may go to submarine cables, but most of the funding required is already done as part of the previous investment.
“Right now, there is no other more efficient technology available than connecting the continents through the sea cables. The dependency and importance of the cables will be even higher because of AI and data centre connectivity,” said Joshi.
On upgrading and expanding its innovation centre in Bengaluru, NTT Data said the centre will focus on AI, digital twin and quantum computing projects. It also talked about NTT’s Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN), a next-generation All-Photonics Network (APN) technology to interconnect data centres in the Mumbai region, facilitating higher-performance data transmission at lower costs. The technology will be available to organisations globally by 2030. Overall, Akira Shimada, President and CEO, NTT, described India as key for the company’s global strategy, ranking as one of its top 10 revenue-generating markets. He expected the region to become one of the top 5 markets shortly.
Globally, NTT is investing $59 billion from FY23 to FY27 into growth areas, including data centres and AI. “We are committed to delivering our integrated full-stack proposition to our clients across data centres, nNetwork, applications, BPaaS, managed services, cloud, security and AI solutions,” he said.
