Anant Raj starts data centre business; to invest Rs 10,000 crore in 4-5 years

Anant Raj Ltd,  a real estate developer, plans to retrofit three commercial projects into data centres with a capacity of almost 300 MW by investing Rs 10,000 crore in four to five years, managing director Amit Sarin said.

The company has set up a subsidiary named Anant Raj Cloud to manage the data centre operations in Manesar, Rai, and Panchkula in Haryana.

“With these three properties, the company can go up to a capacity of 300 MW. We have already operationalised 3 MW and will add another 3 MW in the next three months in our facility based in Manesar,” Sarin told Moneycontrol.

Anant Raj Limited, based in New Delhi, has received the first certification for capacity of 21 MW with a projected investment of Rs 500 crore for its Manesar facility.

“Rs 175 crore has already been deployed on the facility primarily through internal accruals,” he said.

Clients include public sector undertakings, IT, e-commerce and financial companies. Anant Raj has commenced the first phase of the 3 MW data centre in Manesar and has been empanelled as a business partner with Telecommunications Consultants India and RailTel Corporation of India, the company said in a presentation to investors.

Data centre cost

“The company owns the land and has already constructed the buildings. The total investment, including land for these three projects, is close to Rs 3,000 crore. Today, we are talking about 300 MW across these three projects. Upgrading these three facilities will cost close to Rs 7,500 crore,” he said.

Experts said building 1 MW for a data centre costs almost Rs 55 crore but in this case, the land is owned by the company and it may cost them about Rs 25 crore to construct 1 MW. Power is critical for data centre customers who require enough electricity to operate thousands of servers and related IT hardware.

“The company had been focussing on strengthening work for the past three years and has now successfully commissioned 3 MW in Manesar. This facility has the capacity to go up to 50 MW. Rai can go up to 200 MW and Panchkula 50 MW,” he said.

The company had constructed about 5 million square feet of commercial space by 2020 and leased 20 percent. It developed residential projects in the 1980s as a contractor under the Anant Raj Agencies banner, noteworthy among them being the Asian Games Village.

Data centres house IT infrastructure that delivers applications and services and store and manage the associated data. They can be used by an individual company or made available for shared use by multiple companies and customers.

The Indian data centre market is expanding at a compounded annual growth rate of about 40 percent and is expected to attract about $5 billion of investments by 2025. This will drive the next wave of investments, with a target capacity of 1,700 MW to be built by 2025, according to a report by Avendus Capital.