India’s TCS gets TPG to fund half of $2B AI data center project

Indian IT big Tata Consultancy Companies (TCS) has secured $1 billion from non-public fairness agency TPG as a part of a multi-year, $2 billion undertaking to construct a community of gigawatt-scale information facilities within the nation.

The undertaking, dubbed “HyperVault,” comes as demand for AI compute is rising sooner than corporations can construct the power-hungry infrastructure wanted to assist it.

The demand-supply hole for AI compute in India is especially stark: The nation generates practically 20% of the world’s information, however accounts for under about 3% of world information middle capability. Large tech corporations and cloud suppliers have been investing billions of {dollars} to develop native capability and faucet the nation’s rising adoption of AI merchandise.

With HyperVault, TCS and TPG plan to develop liquid-cooled, high-density information facilities with the ability and community capability required to assist superior AI workloads throughout main cloud areas, the businesses mentioned.

Liquid cooling and high-density rack designs are rising widespread because the GPUs wanted to energy AI inference and coaching use considerably extra energy and generate extra warmth than standard CPU servers. However such designs additionally elevate questions on useful resource use in nations like India, the place water shortage is already a priority.

In city hubs resembling Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai, the place a lot of India’s data-center capability is concentrated, present water stress may complicate operations. S&P International, citing Uptime Institute estimates, famous {that a} 1 MW information middle load can require as much as 25.5 million liters of water a yr for cooling, including strain to already strained infrastructure.

The fast constructing of AI information facilities stands to additional stress India’s energy and land use, two different bottlenecks recognized by business analysts. Excessive-density AI clusters require dependable electrical energy provide and enormous parcels of commercial land, two necessities more and more troublesome to safe in main city areas.

Nonetheless, world tech corporations are treating India as their frontier for constructing AI infrastructure. Native and world know-how corporations have introduced investments of greater than $32 billion over the past two years to develop information middle infrastructure within the nation, based on S&P International.

In January, Microsoft mentioned it will make investments $3 billion over two years in India’s cloud and AI infrastructure, and in October, Google mentioned it will spend $15 billion over 5 years to construct a gigawatt-scale AI information middle hub within the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. And again in 2023, Amazon dedicated $12.7 billion to construct AWS cloud infrastructure in India by 2030.

TCS mentioned it will work with hyperscalers and AI corporations to design, deploy, and function AI infrastructure because the platform expands. The corporate plans to construct round 1.2 gigawatts of capability in its preliminary part.

Greater than 95% of India’s new data-center capability over the subsequent 5 years will come from leased services, and the rest will probably be pushed by hyperscalers constructing devoted AI infrastructure, S&P International estimates. Native gamers like Reliance Industries and CtrlS are additionally increasing their data-center capability to satisfy rising demand.

TCS and TPG undertaking that India’s whole data-center capability may exceed 10 gigawatts by 2030, up from roughly 1.5 gigawatts immediately.