CapitaLand India Trust (CLINT), through its subsidiary Minerva Veritas Data Centre Private Limited, is acquiring a 4.01-acre freehold site in Ambattur, Chennai, to develop its third data centre in India.
The REIT’s trustee-manager will invest an estimated total of INR19.4 billion ($328.8 million) to acquire the site and develop a greenfield data centre project in phases over the next four to five years.
The land is expected to be acquired by December for a consideration of INR832.8 million.
According to CLINT, the data centre will have a power capacity of 55 megawatts (MW) to host customers such as global technology giants and cloud service providers, as well as large domestic enterprise clients.
The data centre is slated to be completed by the end of 2025.
“With this latest acquisition, CLINT will have a presence in India’s key data centre markets – Navi Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai, and we are also planning to develop a fourth data centre in Bangalore,” says Sanjeev Dasgupta, CEO of CLINT.
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“This will allow us to expand in the resilient and highly scalable data centre asset class, diversify our data centre portfolio geographically, and enable us to better serve our customers across the country. India’s data consumption and demand for information technology (IT) solutions are fast expanding but the country has one of the world’s lowest data centre densities,” he adds.
In addition, Dasgupta revealed that the REIT will be developing a data centre in Navi Mumbai and another two data centres within its International Tech Parks in Bangalore and Hyderabad. “Our data centres will further enhance the quality of CLINT’s portfolio and deliver sustainable returns to unitholders,” he continues.
Demand for data centres in India is said to be rising due to improving technology infrastructure and increasing adoption of new technologies like 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud and the Internet of Things. According to JLL Research, these factors are expected to expand India’s total data centre capacity to 1,580 MW by 2026 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22%. Chennai is India’s second largest data centre co-location market with current IT load capacity of 88 MW, which is about 12% of the country’s total capacity.
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“CapitaLand Investment (CLI) has been seeing rising investor interest in the digital infrastructure sector and we are actively working on a pipeline of data centre deals across Asia. India is a particularly interesting market; in the last five years, US$14 billion ($18.96 billion) has been invested in India's data centre sector, and the amount is expected to cross US$20 billion by 2025,” says Patrick Boocock, CEO, private equity alternative assets at CLI.
“CapitaLand’s strong core competencies in data centre design, development and operations will enable us to seize opportunities in the country as we build our new economy portfolio globally,” he adds.
“The acquisition site is in a prime data centre location in Ambattur, close to sea cable landing stations, reliable power supply and has a well-developed infrastructure. When fully developed, the data centre will have the capacity to host approximately 4,900 racks and operate at an efficient power usage effectiveness of approximately 1.45. The data centre will adopt sustainable design principles and green building standards. These include features such as intelligent energy management systems, solar panels, and highly efficient cooling systems using low global warming potential refrigerant,” says Surajit Chatterjee, managing director, data centre, India, CLI.
The acquisition and development of the data centre in Chennai will increase CLINT’s total portfolio size by 1.7% to 25.7 million sq ft.
Units in CLINT closed at $1.12 on Dec 12
