India’s data centre boom still in its early stages: Yotta’s Sunil Gupta

Over the next five years, India’s data centre capacity could expand from the current 1 gigawatts to anywhere between 6 and 8 gigawatts, driven by cloud adoption, AI workloads and large-scale investments from global and domestic players, said Sunil Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Yotta.

In a one-on-one interaction with BT on the sidelines of the IAMAI Digital India Summit 2026, Gupta said though India trails far behind global peers like the US, the country’s starting point remains modest. With a population of 1.4 billion, the country has data centre capacity of just around 1.4 gigawatts, compared to the US’s 17 gigawatts for a population of about 350 million. “If you do the math, the US is almost 50 times ahead of India,” Gupta noted, underlining both the gap and the opportunity.

The mismatch becomes starker when viewed through the lens of data creation. India accounts for nearly 20% of the world’s data consumption, yet hosts just around 3% of global data centre capacity. A significant share of India’s social media and digital data continues to be hosted outside the country, an imbalance that policymakers and industry alike are now keen to correct.

That urgency was echoed at the IAMAI summit, where the industry body launched its India Internet Report, highlighting that India crossed 950 million internet users in 2025, with incremental growth increasingly coming from rural India. As millions of new users come online and digital services deepen across sectors, demand for domestic compute, storage and AI infrastructure is expected to surge.

Beyond pure capacity, the conversation is moving towards sovereign cloud and GPU infrastructure. While India has only just begun building large-scale GPU capacity — still far behind the US and China — the expectation is that the country will eventually need millions of GPUs to support AI-led growth.

Policy support will be critical. Gupta pointed to the pre-budget discussions pitching for a sharp scale-up in public investment, tax breaks and infrastructure-style incentives for data centres. “This is not just digital infrastructure,” he said. “It is foundational to India’s digital economy.”

Taken together, the tailwinds — from internet penetration and AI to sovereignty concerns — suggest that India’s data centre market could grow six to eight times over the next five to eight years.