India is in the middle of an exponential data centre buildout. More than 200 projects are in the pipeline, and in 2026, at least one new project has been announced every two weeks.
The first push is coming from the outside. America's AI boom has run into power constraints, with new grid connections taking several years. So the industry is going wherever electricity, land and approvals come faster. India checks more of these boxes than most.
India is among the cheapest places in the world to build a data center, and it is adding renewable power faster than in any earlier year. Moreover, new subsea cables are landing on both sides of the peninsula, and foreign cloud companies that use Indian data centers to serve global clients also now get a 20-year tax holiday.
The second push is at home. Local inference demand for sovereign use cases and Indian enterprises is growing fast. But it’s global demand overflow that’s largely paying for this first wave of build-out here.
The chips, servers and most of the margin are American and Taiwanese. India supplies land, power, buildings and construction. That’s still valuable, and it is feeding many of India’s power-equipment and cable companies (discussed in my last post), but India is closer to being a landlord and a utility than an AI producer.
I expect India to become one of Asia's three or four main data center hubs this decade. We may not match the US or China, but we will play a much larger role in global AI infrastructure than we did in 2023.