India’s second-largest service provider, Bharti Airtel’s data center arm, Nxtra, is targeting scaling up its data centre business as the demand as Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads and cloud adoption continues to surge in the country.
The company is planning to scale capacity to about 1 gigawatt in the next three-four years from the current 120-130 MW. “Over the next three to four years, we believe this capacity could scale to about 1 GW, which would give us around 25% market share. We are committed to stepping up investments in data centers,” said Airtel’s Executive Vice Chairman Gopal Vittal during a recent earnings call. However, he declined to share the precise increase in capital expenditure.
This shift comes as traditional telecom revenue growth moderates following intensive 5G rollouts even as cloud, AI and enterprise demand reshape the competitive landscape.
Big capacity goals and market share aspirations
Growing from roughly 0.13GW to 1 GW would represent nearly an eight-fold increase in capacity, illustrating how Airtel views data centres not as a peripheral unit but as a core strategic pillar alongside its connectivity and digital services stack. The 25% market share target would will position Nxtra into the ranks of India’s largest data centre operators, competing with cloud-native players and standalone infrastructure firms alike.
Nxtra by Airtel is widely regarded among India’s top data centre operators by operational capacity with presence in over ten cities across the country.
Last year, Airtel collaborated with Google Cloud and the Adani Group to support a planned AI-centric data centre hub in Visakhapatnam, indicative of a growing emphasis on cloud-plus-infrastructure models. Airtel is also expanding its cloud business through its recently launched enterprise cloud platform, Xtelify.
This push is happening in a massive expansion phase for data centres in India. Industry estimates show that domestic data centre capacity is expanding rapidly, with strong tailwinds from data localisation requirements, rising enterprise cloud adoption and AI workload growth. Government incentives such as extended tax breaks for global cloud providers are also attracting new investments, a trend Vittal highlighted as supportive of long-term demand.
Airtel is likely to face intense competition in the country’s data center segment. Both the domestic players, like Yotta Infrastructure, Reliance Group, Tata Communications, Sify, Adani Group and Ctrls as well as global players and hyperscalers, such as NTT, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft, are ramping up investment in the country.
“Airtel is investing not just in capacity expansion but also in strengthening data center to data center connectivity, low-latency fiber networks and subsea cable integration, creating a tightly integrated digital infrastructure stack,” Airtel’s Managing Director and CEO, Shashwat Sharma, mentioned during the earnings call.
While demand projections for data centers in India are strong, expansion is constrained by power availability, grid upgrades, land acquisition, and advanced cooling requirements.
