L&T Cloudfiniti Aims to Scale up Data Center Capacity to 90 MW by 2026 L&T Cloudfiniti is specifically build and designed to cater to the high computing requirements of the artificial intelligence (AI) era.
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L &T Cloudfiniti, the data center arm of Larsen & Toubro, plans to scale its data center capacity to 90 MW by the end of next year across three cities – Mahape and Panvel in Maharashtra, and Whitefield in Bengaluru. It has a current capacity of 30 MW across two data centers in Mumbai and Chennai.
L&T is a new entrant in the data center business as Cloudfiniti became operational only last year. However, the leadership is of the belief that it is well positioned to take on the market with its strong pedigree.
"50 per cent of the data center capacity that were built in India over the last 12 years during its high growth period, was built by L&T as EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction). So L&T had everything from land parcels, good quality capital, excellent engineering talent, and experience. Given the growth of data center that India will see, there is space for L&T to grow or invest in this growth as service provider," Seema Ambastha, CEO of L&T Cloudfiniti told Entrepreneur India.
L&T Cloudfiniti is specifically build and designed to cater to the high computing requirements of the artificial intelligence (AI) era.
"AI and HPC (high performance computing) are driving a lot of our current data center demand as they require a very high density, special kind of a data center with specialised hybrid cooling systems. The second driver is cloud migration and hybrid cloud adoptions which is on continuous rise. Third, digital transformation is driving a lot of the enterprise demand. Finally, sovereignty and data localisation is driving the growth as sovereign hosting has now become extremely important for the country," said Ambastha. "We are an AI data center. That's our sweet spot. 80 per cent of our capacity is built to cater to AI"
According to ratings agency Crisil, India's data centre capacity is expected to more than double to 2-2.3 GW by fiscal 2027 due to increasing digitalisation of the economy and enterprises putting more investments in cloud storage. Further, rising penetration of generative AI (GenAI) will drive the demand over the medium term, Crisil said.
Currently hyperscalers are complementing the growth of players like Cloudfiniti. "As hyperscalers are driving the maximum demand for cloud data centers, colo capacity you create could augment their capacity of bridge co-location data centers," said Ambastha.
Banking, financial services & insurance (BFSI), IT/ITeS, and Manufacturing are some of the key sectors that are driving Cloudfiniti's growth. "L&T itself is one of our large client," she said.
