Indian Data Centers to See Five-fold Increase in Capacity

Article By : ICRA

Overall, 3,900–4,100MW of data center capacity are likely to get added in the next five years in India.

The Indian data centers market is witnessing healthy growth, primarily driven by large hyper-scalers like Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Uber, and Dropbox, to name a few, who are outsourcing their storage needs to third party data center providers.

To cater to the increasing demand, Indian corporates like the Hiranandani Group, Adani Group; foreign investors viz. Amazon, EdgeConnex, Microsoft, CapitaLand, Mantra Group have started investing in Indian data centers. Along with them, existing players like NTT, CtrlS, Nxtra, STT India are also expanding their capacities. Overall, 3900-4100MW of capacity involving investments of Rs1.05 – 1.20 lakh crore are likely to get added in the next five years.

“The favorable regulatory support, rapidly growing cloud computing, increasing internet penetration, Government effort on digital economy, adoption of new technologies (IoT, 5G, etc.), growing needs of hyper-scalers are some of the major factors driving the demand for data centers in the country. The sector is likely to witness a five-fold increase in capacities in the next five years. In addition, the Government of India (GoI) accorded infrastructure status to the data centers in the Union Budget 2022-2023. This will enable the players to get access to longer tenured debt at competitive rates and access to foreign funding through the external commercial borrowing route,” said Rajeshwar Burla, Group Head, Corporate Ratings, ICRA.

The industry revenues are expected to increase at a CAGR of around 18-19% during FY2022-FY2024 (24% CAGR growth during FY2018-FY2021), supported by increase in rack capacity utilization and ramp-up of new DCs. With increase in revenues and better absorption of fixed costs, operating margins are likely to improve and remain in the range of 40%–42%. The ROCE is expected to remain modest as the DC players are in continuous large capex mode wherein the ramp up of the DCs happen over a period of time. The key challenges for the sector are, increasing competitive intensity which is expected to exert pressure on margins for incremental business and large-debt funded capex plans could exert pressure on credit metrics of the players.

“Between the two major services provided by the DC players, co-location services account for around 62%-65% of revenues as compared to managed services which account for 28%–30% of revenues. The upcoming investments are geared towards meeting high demand in co-location services. These services have higher operating margins due to shared resources compared to managed services clients. On the cost structure, power expenses account for 55–60% of total costs towards maintenance of multiple cooling paths and redundancy. Given the ESG considerations for most of the key tenants, DC players are also expected to invest in green power to meet their power requirements. We can expect DC players to do substantial investments in solar power going forward,” Burla added.

Some of the state governments (Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh) have provisions of special incentives like exemption on stamp and electricity duty, power subsidies, land at subsidized cost and other concessions by some of the state governments to boost DC investments. Further, the IT ministry has plans to offer incentives worth up to Rs15,000 crore under a national policy framework for DCs. This includes an incentive of 4–6% if the components (IT hardware and power) are procured from Indian manufacturing units and incentive of up to 3% for use of renewable energy.

 

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