Adani’s $100B CapEx push puts telecom and enterprise networking in spotlight

Adani Group’s five-year, nearly $100-billion capital-expenditure roadmap is best known for its energy and infrastructure pillars, but one of its more striking storylines is a full reversal in how the group approaches telecom and enterprise networking. What began in 2022 as a bid to become a private-network operator for its own ports, airports and factories has, by 2025-26, turned into an exit from telecom infrastructure altogether, paired with a separate, vastly larger commitment to build the data centres and cloud capacity that other companies’ networks, and India’s AI ambitions, will run on.

From private 5G ambition to retreat
In 2022, Adani Data Networks Limited (ADNL) paid roughly ₹212 crore for 400 MHz of spectrum in the 26 GHz millimetre-wave band across six telecom circles, Gujarat, Mumbai, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and secured a unified licence to offer telecom services. The plan was to build captive private 5G networks with enhanced cybersecurity for the group’s own ports, airports, power and logistics operations, and to support a planned super-app spanning its businesses. By early 2025, however, the Department of Telecommunications was pressing ADNL over missed minimum rollout obligations and mounting penalties. Adani told regulators that deploying its own captive private networks had proven commercially unviable, and in April 2025 ADNL signed definitive agreements to transfer its entire 26 GHz spectrum holding to Bharti Airtel and Bharti Hexacom, effectively exiting the telecom-infrastructure business it had entered three years earlier.

The new networking bet: Data centres, not cell towers
The retreat from private 5G was not a retreat from networking altogether. That same month, Adani announced a separate $10-billion incremental investment in data centres to capture rising AI and business-process-outsourcing demand. That figure has since grown sharply: in February 2026, the group committed $100 billion to build renewable-energy-powered, AI-ready data centres across India by 2035, describing it as an investment in “sovereign AI infrastructure.” The plan is anchored by landmark partnerships, a gigawatt-scale campus with Google in Visakhapatnam and a further site in Noida, facilities with Microsoft in Hyderabad and Pune, and an expanded AdaniConneX tie-up with Flipkart for a second AI-focused data centre. Underpinning all of it is Adani Green Energy’s 30-gigawatt Khavda renewable complex, more than 10 GW of which is already operational, alongside a further $55-billion renewable build-out that includes one of the world’s largest battery energy storage systems, intended to guarantee the reliable, round-the-clock power that AI-scale computing demands.

Enterprise networking, repositioned
What this means in practice is a change in what “enterprise networking” means for the Adani Group. Rather than owning spectrum and running private wireless networks for its ports, airports, power and logistics units, the group now intends to consume connectivity from licensed telecom operators as a service, while building and owning the compute and colocation layer, data centres, cloud capacity and the power that feeds them, that telecom operators, hyperscalers and enterprises alike will need. In effect, Adani has moved from trying to compete with Airtel and Jio for spectrum to becoming a landlord and power supplier for the AI economy those companies, along with Google, Microsoft and domestic enterprises, are racing to build.

What it means for the wider ecosystem
For telecom operators, the spectrum transfer removes a would-be private-network rival from six circles and hands Bharti Airtel additional millimetre-wave capacity. For hyperscalers, server and networking-equipment makers, and cooling and power-infrastructure vendors, Adani’s pivot makes the group a major customer and site developer rather than a competitor, with its captive renewable generation seen as a differentiator for landing anchor tenants. The group has said its $100-billion data-centre commitment could catalyse a further $150 billion across server manufacturing, sovereign cloud platforms and related industries by 2035, adding up to a projected $250-billion AI-infrastructure ecosystem in India over the decade.

In a nutshell
The contrast is instructive: the 2022 ambition was to become a telecom operator; the 2026 reality is to become the power-and-compute backbone that other companies’ networks and AI workloads run on. Whether the Google, Microsoft and Flipkart campuses land on schedule, how smoothly the surrendered 26 GHz spectrum transfer is completed, and how quickly Adani Green’s renewable capacity scales alongside data-centre construction will determine how fast this new networking identity, built on data centres and power rather than cell towers and spectrum, takes hold.

CT Bureau