Changing Role: Yotta’s experience as a data centre service provider

Artificial intelligence (AI), the data explosion, technologies such as 5G, the government’s digitalisation push, cloud adoption and the surge in digital services such as UPI are all contributing to the growth of India’s data centre industry. The country’s data centre market size is expected to grow from $5 billion in 2024 to $12.9 billion in 2033. Currently, about 50 per cent of the data centre capacity is being used by hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle. The remaining 50 per cent belongs mostly to the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector and, increasingly, to new AI companies.

Service tiers and capabilities

In terms of mapping the overall data centre market, whether in India or globally, the players can be segregated into a few categories.

Real estate players: Real estate players are now entering the  data centre market through joint ventures (JVs) with traditional data centre operators. They simply create the core-and-shell building and hand it over to their JV partner or end consumer, who then proceeds with data centre services.

Co-location providers: The role of typical co-location providers spans from taking the land and building to managing the non-IT mechanical, electrical and plumbing infrastructure – power, cooling, transformers, generators, chillers, security and 24×7 uptime.

Co-location + hardware providers: This category of providers handles the building itself and the non-IT power and cooling infrastructure, and provides servers, racks, network cabling, remote-hand or smart-hand services, and on-site operations support.

Integrated digital transformation service providers: This category of data centre providers, which is what Yotta is looking to explore, invests heavily and obtains private equity and bank funding. Yotta’s approach is to go beyond being a real estate player or a co-location provider by investing in IT hardware and adding software services.

Key service offerings

One of the key services provided by Yotta is is pure data centre or co-location. Data centre service providers build the infrastructure and rent it out, and the customers bring in their own IT to run a software-based business. Yotta has three data centres in this space.

The bottom layer is co-location and data centre build services. If hyperscalers need a data centre tailored to their own design or specifications, Yotta constructs it and delivers the infrastructure so that they can bring in their IT load and run it.

Then, the next level, supporting services, which include network services and cybersecurity, where fibre is brought in, power is brought in, security services are brought in, multiple services are brought in as per the standard design, and these services act as a support service to the basic co-location services that Yotta offers.

Another layer is infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service. This is where something such as “Yantra”, our CPU cloud, comes in. Yantra was developed by Yotta with local engineers and has an Indian IP, ensuring that critical Indian data remains under local ownership.

Yotta’s portfolio

Yotta’s portfolio features Tier III and Tier IV data centres, three of which are operational. There is an 800 MW campus in Navi Mumbai (Panvel) with the NM1 building, which supports 52 MW of IT load and is live. In that facility, it has contracted around 16,000 graphic processing units (GPUs) with Nvidia, making Yotta the first in India to do so on that scale.

Yotta is also partnering with India’s AI mission, supplying more than 50-60 per cent of its GPUs. In Greater Noida, the company has a 200 MW campus. Additionally, it has a boutique enterprise data centre in GIFT City, Gujarat, specifically for the BFSI sector and the trading community.

Outlook

Yotta is providing more than 8,000 GPUs for the India AI mission. Once a company enters the cloud or AI services domain, a whole suite of cybersecurity responsibilities and capabilities naturally follows. At that point, it is no longer just a real estate or a power-and-cooling provider; it evolves into a next-level IT player, assuming a new set of risks, investments and rewards. Capital expenditure in such a scenario can easily exceed that of a conventional data centre operator, often by a factor of 10. However, this is matched – if not surpassed – by the scale of revenue opportunities, which may increase tenfold or even twentyfold, accompanied by stronger earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, and overall profitability.

The transformation is also evident in manpower requirements. The shift to IT-centric services brings a new cost dynamic – manpower becomes the primary expense, particularly for development and operations. While the initial outlay is significant, the model gains traction as new services are rolled out and customer adoption grows, eventually unlocking robust revenue streams. s

Based on a presentation by Rohan Sheth, Head, Co-location, Data Centre Build and Global Expansion, Yotta Infrastructure Solutions