Ricoh India will be investing $45.1M to set up a data center and business facilities at its Gandhinagar-based facility in Western India, according to a report on the The Economic Times. This will be the company’s third data center in India, after two existing data centers located in Kolkata and Delhi.

“This centre will help us in strengthening our presence here through services like cloud computing and data storage,” said company managing director and CEO Manoj Kumarsaid, who noted that the newest data center will be much larger.

india flag keyboard thinkstock photos tashatuvango
– Thinkstock / Tashatuvango

One-stop destination

The business facilities will serve as a one-stop destination for Ricoh’s IT services division, which will lend its support to help these businesses run their IT operations. The investment will be made over the next two or three years.

Despite its population being one of the largest in the world, India has been comparatively slow in establishing new data centers to meet increasing demand. Part of the reason could be attributed to challenges in infrastructure that the country currently faces.

As we reported earlier, rolling power-cuts are commonplace in parts of India, and even massive-scale power outages that span multiple states are known to happen. Indeed, India President Pranab Mukherjee last year promised around-the-clock power for all by 2022 as one of his administration’s policy priorities.

Still, the winds of change are blowing, with IBM launching its second SoftLayer data center and Microsoft opening its Indian data centers in the month of October alone. Amazon Web Services (AWS) too, had announced that it will open an infrastructure hub in India in 2016 – which typically consists of two or more geographically separated data centers.

And we reported in July Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle has said that the company is in discussions with “a lot of local players” to set up a data center in India. While Kurian wouldn’t commit to a date, he did note that the setting up of a data center could happen within “a matter of a few months or a year”.