A regional government in India is getting external investment for two new data centers.

The Maharashtra government announced at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland this week that it had signed memoranda of understanding (MOU) with two companies worth ~$3.9 billion or Rs 32,414 crore to build two data centers in the city of Pune, in western India.

One of these deals was with RCube/Ark Data Centres. RCube is seemingly a French hedge fund manager, while Ark is a UK data center operator.

Ark is proposing to invest Rs 12,000 crore ($1.47bn) for a data center in the Pimpri-Chinchwad district of the city. No details about the data center have been revealed yet, though the Maharashtra government is anticipating that the facility will generate around 1,200 jobs in the region.

This investment would mark Ark Data Centres’ first facility outside of the UK. The company has yet to make an announcement and DCD has reached out for more information.

The second MoU was signed with Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), which is investing Rs 20,414 crores ($2.5bn) to develop data centers in Mumbai, Thane, Pune, and Nagpur. The project is hoped to generate 1,500 jobs across all four sites.

Industries minister Uday Samant said: “In these new projects, we have decided to give 80 percent of the jobs to the locals. In the next cabinet meeting, we will decide on the new policy under which these projects will get necessary permissions within 30 days.”

Samant further said that through foreign direct investment, they have taken important decisions that will help the youth. The government is taking all necessary efforts to reduce unemployment and develop the state as an industrial hub.

While Pune does not yet have a significant data center market, last October Microsoft revealed that they had purchased 25 acres of land for nearly Rs 329 crore ($39.7m) and planned to build a data center there.