Is India's data centre boom straining its power grid?
A new report says yes. Here's why the answer isn't fewer data centres.
Is India's data centre boom straining its power grid? A new report says yes. I have a different take.
According to an article in the Straits Times last week, India's data centre boom is straining its power grid. I see it from a somewhat different lens.
The warning
First, here's what the report said. India currently has nearly 300 data centres, which use just 0.5% of the country's electricity. As a comparison, Singapore with its 1.4GW of data centres stands at 7%.
Data centres are changing rapidly though. By 2030, the 0.5% figure will jump to 3%. Overall, India's data centre capacity is set to jump from 1.5GW to 13.2GW by 2032.
The headlines are hard to miss for sure. AWS is spending US$12.7 billion and Google has earmarked US$15 billion. Various operators have announced massive builds too.
The pressure could lead to some changes: data centres moving out of metros, growth in renewable power deals, and more efficient data centres. But these are unlikely to happen quickly.
And as demand climbs past what the grid can supply, it is ordinary citizens who could end up paying the price, whether through higher tariffs or power cuts. Some experts now want a hard rule: create legislation to compel large data centres to power themselves.
Where the load sits
What do the numbers look like? Here are some figures from the report, which pulled them from Data Centre Map, CBRE, and Savills.
- Kolkata: 16MW, 9 DCs
- Mumbai: 640MW, 46 DCs
- Chennai: 289MW, 33 DCs
- Hyderabad: 58MW, 28 DCs
- New Delhi: 115MW, 38 DCs
- Bengaluru: 101MW, 31 DCs
Note: counting data centres is notoriously inaccurate due to the massive disparity in MW possible with each facility.
Data centres are the future
The global messaging around data centres is increasingly negative, as AI facilities get built right next to neighbourhoods in the US. But from where I sit in Asia, I see it differently.
Today, data centres power nearly everything: the websites we use for work and leisure, the cloud services that run the apps we rely on, and of course, AI tools. When outages happen, such as with the Almere Data Centre fire in the Netherlands recently, schools, transport firms, and businesses all feel it.
And here's the thing. India doesn't have nearly enough data centres for a population of more than a billion. The power constraints are real and must be addressed.
But they are a problem worth solving, not a reason to stop building. The answer isn't fewer data centres. It's better planning.
What do you think?
