New Delhi: Bharti Airtel’s data centre arm Nxtra is planning to raise about $1 billion to significantly expand its digital infrastructure and support the rapid growth of artificial intelligence workloads in India. The capital increase is proposed to increase the data centre scale of the company to the level of gigawatts, which will make Nxtra one of the most popular digital infrastructure companies in the country, reported by the Economics Times.
The capitalisation is likely to attract Alpha Wave Global as its new investor in addition to the current stakeholders. The relocation follows a period when the Indian data centre demand is gaining momentum following the surge in AI applications, cloud computing, and the prevalent need to have data localisation.
Alpha wave global expected to join as new investor
According to the suggested investment pattern, the initial estimate is that the investment will be made by Alpha Wave Global of approximately $400 million, and Bharti Airtel and the current investor, The Carlyle Group, will contribute to the investment about $300 million each. The entire $1 billion funding will come through primary capital, which will be used to expand Nxtra’s data centre infrastructure across the country.
Alpha Wave Global is an investment platform that is associated with the name of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi. The company has already supported some of the largest technology firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, and SpaceX.
Expansion linked to Google’s AI infrastructure project
The intended investment is in line with the overall Airtel interests of developing massive AI infrastructure in India. Airtel is planning to establish an AI hub and data centre complex in Visakhapatnam with Google and the Adani Group worth 15 billion dollars.
The plant is predicted to comprise the tensor processing units (TPUs) of Google that train and execute massive artificial intelligence models. The role of Airtel in the undertaking will be largely expenses in the form of high-capacity telecom connectivity and fibre infrastructure.
Nxtra’s growth strategy and market position
In 2020, Airtel separated its data centre business into Nxtra to be able to draw external investment and grow the business separately. In 2021, the company divested a 24.04 percent stake in The Carlyle Group for approximately $235 million, which valued Nxtra at approximately $1.2 billion at the time.
Nxtra currently has the scale of one of the largest data centre networks in India and has hyperscale data centres in the key cities and edge data centres in dozens of locations around the country. The installed capacity of the company is above 230 MW, and the company has secured a total of above 390 MW of renewable energy capacity to carry out its operations.
The data centre industry in India is experiencing an upsurge in investments as firms are competing to develop infrastructure that can support AI and cloud workloads. The number of data centre capacities in the country may increase by about one hundred per cent, according to industry estimates that the total capacity is approximately 1.4 GW to approximately 10 GW in the next few years.
Nxtra has approximately a 10 to 12 percent share in the Indian data centre market and seeks to dominate the same to approximately 25 percent within the next few years. The new funding will boost the growth of the firm, as it will have a high demand globally by technology firms and domestically by local business ventures since the Indian market is highly developing in digital infrastructure.