Digital Realty and Brookfield Infrastructure announced an agreement to establish a fifty/fifty joint venture focused on the development, ownership and operation of institutional quality data centres in India. The joint venture will operate under the brand name BAM Digital Realty.
With a population of over one billion, the world’s fifth-largest economy in terms of GDP and an expanding focus on the digital delivery of services, India represents a key market opportunity to extend coverage, capacity and connectivity options for the world’s leading service providers as well as local and global enterprise customers. India is a high-growth market, with data centre demand expected to significantly increase, driven by rapidly growing data consumption, digitisation of the economy, the onset of 5G and data localisation trends.
The joint venture is positioned to enable the significant expansion of PlatformDIGITAL, the company’s premier global data centre platform which supports the evolving data, control and networking demands of global enterprises. Its deployment across India is expected to enable customers to rapidly scale digital transformation by deploying critical infrastructure with a leading global data centre provider at the heart of a growing connected data community in India. Data centres developed in India will leverage their industry-leading energy-efficient data centre design and operating procedures and highly repeatable pervasive data centre architecture approach for the new digital workplace.
“India is a rapidly emerging data centre market and offers a bright future, with accelerating adoption of digital business models among a population that recognises the role of technology for future economic development,” William Stein, chief executive officer of Digital Realty, said. “Our existing partnership has already delivered long-term value to our customers, with over 250 megawatts of IT load capacity in Brazil, Chile and Mexico either fully built out or currently under construction. We look forward to building upon our successful partnership with Brookfield by entering the Indian data centre market together and extending opportunities for digital transformation with global consistency.”
The joint venture will expand its significant global data infrastructure portfolio, which currently includes 23 billion dollars in assets across data transmission, distribution, and storage, including a portfolio of 139,000 operational telecom wireless towers in India, which it intends to expand to 175,000 over the near term.
“We are pleased to further expand both our partnership and our presence in India through this joint venture,” Arpit Agrawal, managing director and head of India & Middle East at Brookfield Infrastructure, said.”Through the development of a high-quality, multi-city, India-focused data centre platform, we believe BAM Digital Realty is well-positioned to play a meaningful role in addressing the large and growing data demand in the country and to offer a differentiated solution to customers.”
