Data Centres
Strategic Infrastructure for the Digital Economy
A data centre is a facility housing computer systems, servers, storage infrastructure, and networking equipment for centralised data processing and storage. With the explosion of AI workloads, cloud computing, and digital services, data centres have become critical national infrastructure. India's data centre market was growing at ~30% CAGR in 2024-25, driven by cloud adoption, government's Digital India push, and AI investment. However, the bulk of cloud infrastructure serving Indian enterprises resides in US-headquartered hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) — raising concerns about data sovereignty and digital dependence.
- Data Protection Board: established under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act), 2023 — requires data fiduciaries to handle personal data responsibly.
- Data localisation: DPDP Act empowers the government to designate certain countries to which cross-border data transfer is prohibited — a key data sovereignty tool.
- Budget 2026-27: data centres granted infrastructure status under the Harmonised Master List of Infrastructure — enabling access to infrastructure finance, viability gap funding, and priority-sector classification.
- 5-year tax holiday for new data centre investments: provided under Section 80-IC-type provisions (extended to new sectors).
- India's data centre capacity: approximately 950 MW as of 2025; target of 2,000+ MW by 2027.
- AI computing demands are doubling data centre power consumption every 2-3 years; India's NVIDIA/GPU allocations under the IndiaAI Mission aim to build sovereign AI compute.
● Tracked since February 01, 2026 · last seen March 31, 2026 · updates as the daily brief publishes