Shares of Anant Raj surged sharply in early trade on February 2 after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a major policy push to boost investments in data centres as part of the Union Budget.
The stock jumped over 7% in morning deals and was trading 7.02% higher at ₹568.35 as of 9:26 AM IST, reflecting strong investor optimism around companies linked to data centre infrastructure and digital real estate.
During her Budget speech on February 1, Sitharaman proposed a tax holiday till 2047 for foreign companies providing global cloud services using data centres based in India. However, such companies will be required to serve Indian customers through an Indian reseller entity. The government also announced a safe harbour margin of 15% on cost for data centre services when provided by a related entity, a move aimed at reducing tax-related uncertainties and encouraging long-term investments.
The announcements come at a time when India is accelerating efforts to build a robust artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and semiconductor ecosystem. In March 2024, the government approved the ambitious IndiaAI Mission with an outlay of ₹104 billion. The initiative aims to create a public AI compute infrastructure with more than 10,000 GPUs through a public-private partnership model.
