Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has secured $1 billion from private equity firm TPG as part of a multi-year, $2 billion project to build a network of gigawatt-scale data centers in the country.
The project, dubbed “HyperVault,” comes as demand for AI compute is rising faster than companies can build the power-hungry infrastructure needed to support it.
The demand-supply gap for AI compute in India is particularly stark: the country generates nearly 20% of the world’s data, but accounts for only about 3% of global data center capacity. Big tech companies and cloud providers have been investing billions of dollars to expand local capacity and tap the country’s growing adoption of AI products.
With HyperVault, TCS and TPG plan to develop liquid-cooled, high-density data centers with the power and network capacity required to support advanced AI workloads across major cloud regions, the companies said.
Liquid cooling and high-density rack designs are growing common as the GPUs needed to power AI inference and training use significantly more power and generate more heat than conventional CPU servers. But such designs also raise questions about resource use in countries like India, where water scarcity is already a concern.
In urban hubs such as Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai, where much of India’s data-center capacity is concentrated, existing water stress could complicate operations. S&P Global, citing Uptime Institute estimates, noted that a 1-MW data center load can require up to 25.5 million liters of water a year for cooling, adding pressure to already strained infrastructure.
The rapid building of AI data centers stands to further stress India’s power and land use, two other bottlenecks identified by industry analysts. High-density AI clusters require reliable electricity supply and large parcels of industrial land, two requirements increasingly difficult to secure in major urban regions.
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Nonetheless, global tech companies are treating India as their frontier for building AI infrastructure. Local and global technology firms have announced investments of more than $32 billion over the last two years to expand data center infrastructure in the country, according to S&P Global.
In January, Microsoft said it would invest $3 billion over two years in India’s cloud and AI infrastructure, and in October, Google said it would spend $15 billion over five years to build a gigawatt-scale AI data center hub in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. And back in 2023, Amazon committed $12.7 billion to build AWS cloud infrastructure in India through 2030.
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