Microsoft is reportedly planning to open a data center in the city of Hyderabad, India, according to local media.
Per the Business Standard, the company is in the final stages of talks with the Telangana government to set up a data center in the region with a total investment of Rs 15,000 crore ($2 billion).
That $2 billion figure seems high for even a whole data center campus, and, if true, signifies a huge investment by the company in a single location.
For comparison, CapitaLand-owned Ascendas India Trust said it was to invest $162 million to build a 90MW data center campus on a 6-acre plot in Navi Mumbai. Web Werks this week announced it was investing $100 million building a 125,000 sq ft (11,600 sqm), 20MW facility in Bengaluru.
Earlier this year NTT said it aimed to spend $2 billion adding more than 1 million sq ft of data center space and some 150MW of capacity – including a significant investment in renewable energy and cable landing points – across six data center parks in India over the next three years.
Despite the questionable investment figure, the company has reportedly ‘zeroed in on a land parcel’ near Hyderabad for the facility. Microsoft declined to comment.
“In the information technology (IT) space, Telangana is already seeing some major investments. Microsoft is establishing its data center here, and it may come out with a public announcement soon,” a source told the publication.
Microsoft currently has three Azure regions in India in Pune, Chennai, and Mumbai that all opened in 2015.
In 2019 Microsoft partnered with Reliance Jio with the local telco to build data centers across India that run Microsoft’s Azure cloud. The first two facilities under the 10-year partnership were two data centers to be developed in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra.
