NTT India to double revenue, data centre capacity

Japanese technology major NTT Group expects to double its revenue from India—where it is the market leader in data centre and cloud segment—and storage capacity over the next two years, top group officials said on Thursday.

Towards this, the company will invest over $2.5 billion over the next five years, most of which will go into setting up more data centres, green energy and a submarine cable landing facility in Maharashtra.

This additional investment is over and above the $2 billion capex announced in late 2018.

NTT Data is a $30-billion IT services and data centres provider globally and in India, it is the largest data centre operator with over 22% market share with a capacity of over 2.1 million square feet, handling 230 MW operational load and has a combined (data centres, cloud segment and IT services) revenue of over $700 million in 2022, which is under-5% of its global top line.

The NTT Group, which began as a telecom company, has over the years become a diversified technology major by acquiring close to 100 companies. In India too, it entered the data centre business by buying out Sharad Sanghi-promoted Netmagic in the last decade.

India is our fastest-growing data centre and IT services market, having clipped at 51% in 2022. This is the only single-country regional market for us outside of our home country. India is also the largest market outside Japan, employing over 37,000 of its 3.5 lakh people, Abhijit Dubey, the global chief executive of NTT Data and Sharad Sanghi, the managing director of NTT Data India, told reporters here on Thursday.

They said, currently, India contributes around $700 million to our global top line, which is under-5% of their $20 billion global revenue in 2022. But, the firm is confident of doubling this and taking it closer to $2 billion over the next two years.

Towards this, we will also more than double our data centre capacity to 510 MW with over 4.6 million square feet that can handle 510 MW operational load from the present 2.1 million square feet handling 230 MW operational load across its 12 operational data centres, they added.

Globally, NTT Data is among the top 3 data centre service providers with over 2,000 MW operational load, serving 65% of the Fortune Global 500 and over 75% of the Fortune Global 100.

With 12 operational data centres now across Mumbai, Chennai Bengaluru and Noida, NTT is the market leader in the over 1,000 MW domestic data centre and cloud segment. The company opened two new data centres in Mumbai on March 9.

It will add four more data facilities in these cities by June and three more are under construction in Kolkata, Lucknow and Pune, which together will add another 2.5 million square feet of data centre space with over 280 MW load within the next two years, Sanghi said.

Dubey said as part of its carbon neutral plan, the entire India operations will be run on green energy from 2030 and net zero by 2040. Already over 30% of our power demand is met through renewables, and we are heavily investing in the same, which will have the maximum impact in Maharashtra, where we have the maximum space.

The company has already invested over $800 million in green power, he added.

Maharashtra will also have a new submarine landing station in one of our data centres and another landing station will come up in our Chennai data centre facility. These submarine cables will connect India with Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, Dubey and Sanghi said without disclosing how much investment will flow into them.

On the fast-changing data centre landscape, they said the company leads in innovation, and NTT was the first to globally deploy liquid immersion cooling and direct contact liquid cooling technologies at its Navi Mumbai data centre in Airoli. The facility has a capacity of 4.8 MW spread over 13,740 square feet. PTI