India’s Techno Digital plans to invest $1bn to fund expansion of its data center capacity.

CEO Ankit Saraiya told Entrepreneur India that this would help the operator bring its capacity up to 250MW within the next five years.

Saraiya also said that it was attempting to create "interconnected Edge data centers on railway optical fiber networks” in collaboration with government-owned broadband company RailTel.

“The idea is [that] in the next 4-5 years, we should develop approximately 100 of these Edge data centers.”

Techno Digital is a new data center player. Launched in May of this year, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Indian power infrastructure firm Techno Electric.

The company recently launched a 36MW data center in the southern Indian city of Chennai, and it has two more data centers – one in Kolkata offering 20MW of capacity at completion, and another in Noida – in its development pipeline.

India is a growth market for data centers, with the majority of its facilities concentrated in major urban centers, including Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore.

According to DC Byte, the amount of live capacity in India constitutes only 14 percent, or 1.2GW, of the country’s total 8.9GW of supply. The remaining 86 percent is made up by projects that are under construction, committed, and in their early stages, with the latter category constituting 57 percent of the total supply.