Equinix invests $86 million to build its third data centre in Mumbai

Equinix, a data centre corporation based in the United States, has announced an initial investment of $86 million in a new data centre in Mumbai. The company has purchased a four-acre plot of property in the city’s Chandivali neighborhood.

The new data centre, which will be known as MB3, will be Equinix’s third in Mumbai. MB3 IBX will be located next to Equinix MB2 IBX and 1.5 kilometers from MB1 IBX.

Equinix invests $86 million

The first phase of MB3 is set to open in Q2 2024, with an initial capacity of over 1,375 cabinets and a total capacity of over 4,150 cabinets when entirely built out.

For the land acquisition, JLL served as Equinix’s only real estate advisor.

According to a recent JLL analysis, Mumbai is the country’s largest data centre market. Moreover, with demand predicted to expand 2.5 times to almost 530 megawatts (MW) by 2023. Mumbai, India’s financial hub, is home to a dozen subsea cable landing points. As well as the majority of the world’s major cloud service providers’ cloud regions.

Equinix expanded into Chennai in March of this year, purchasing 5.5 acres of land.

“Equinix’s continuous investment in Mumbai will strengthen its network-dense, interconnection-rich data centre platform in India, satisfying strong demand from both global and local customers,” says the company. This expansion will help Indian enterprises improve their digital transformation strategies. While also allowing global companies from a variety of industries to develop their operations in India.

“The increasing digitalization of economy is continuously driving the demand for data centre and interconnection services in India. Particularly in Mumbai, the high demand for our digital infrastructure services among Indian and international customers is making us very optimistic about the market,” Manoj Paul, Managing Director, Equinix India said.

Equinix focuses on infrastructure

“We are focused on making additional infrastructure investments in India. To enable our existing and new customers in India to launch services closer to their consumers”. He said, adding that the investment will also support the government’s vision. Of making India a key data centre hub in Southeast Asia.

Equinix maintains more than 240 data centres in 70 cities around the world, providing digital infrastructure to more than 10,000 of the world’s most successful companies. Equinix has 52 data centres throughout Asia-Pacific, including locations in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

According to CRISIL, India’s data centre capacity is predicted to quadruple to around 1,700-1,800 megawatts (MW). By fiscal 2025, up from 870 MW in fiscal 2022, thanks to a combination of data growth, digital adoption. And local data storage laws. Data centres are growing as an appealing infrastructure asset class in India, according to Nitesh Jain, Director, CRISIL Ratings. During fiscal years 2023-25, he continued, the industry is likely to add almost 850-900 MW of capacity.