Bharti Airtel is pushing its horizons on the business front. As per the reports on Thursday, it became pretty clear that Bharti Airtel’s business front, Airtel Business, which offers B2B services is becoming the most profitable of the lot which the company owns. On the same lines, in a recent development, we have come to know that Bharti Airtel will be driving more investment towards its data centres to the tune of Rs 3,500 crore. In the previous years, due to the lack of proper data protection laws mostly the Indian data was stored overseas, however, the demand for storing data on national lands has shot up in the last few years. As such, data centre demand has grown with the rising payment operations on mobile phones and online. Prior to the launch of 5G services and to support this infrastructure, Bharti Airtel is likely to ramp up its data centre capacity by three or five times and install 100 MW data parks in the coming months.
Airtel to Setup Eight More Data Centres
Bharti Airtel also owns Nxtra Data Ltd which holds the data centres under Airtel’s banners. As per a new ET Telecom report, Bharti Airtel will build up to eight data centres in cities like Mumbai and Pune, wherein there will also be data parks, with each park consisting of multiple buildings. These parks would be of 100 MW capacity. On asking for more questions, Airtel declined to comment on the ground that it does not respond to market speculation. It’s worth noting that Airtel Business boasts of having a 31% market share in the B2B segment, when it comes to services like data, voice, IoT, and other digital infrastructure.
Big Companies Betting on Data Centres
As per an investment firm JLL, India’s data demand will grow to 1,007 MW by 2023 from its existing capacity of 447 MW. Also, last year US-based Carlyle group had driven investment of $235 million into Nxtra Data Ltd thus pegging the value of the company at $1.2 billion. Since India stands at the cusp of the 5G rollout, the demand for data centres is more than ever and even companies like Microsoft are betting on the same.
