India has spent three decades building strength across IT services, digital public infrastructure, and technology talent. Its next leap will depend on the compute infrastructure backbone needed to scale AI adoption. India has strong momentum to emerge as a global data-center hub, with capacity expected to reach 6–8 GW by 2030, supported by $100B+ in committed investment, growing domestic demand, strong connectivity, and a power advantage. This build-out could catalyze a wider economic flywheel beyond the data-center facility itself—creating demand across construction, power, cooling, connectivity, and equipment, while strengthening domestic capabilities and supply chains. It can also create a significant talent opportunity: with two-thirds of data-center operators globally reporting talent shortages, India’s large engineering base can be trained for emerging roles across the data-center ecosystem. Capturing this opportunity will require infrastructure to scale responsibly across energy, water, land, construction, waste, and pollution. At the same time, infrastructure must meet five core enterprise needs: control and choice, transparency and compliance, security and trust, performance and resilience, and commercials.
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