Surajit Chatterjee, Managing Director and Head of Data Centres, CapitaLand Investment
India’s data centre market has grown to over 1.3 GW today, with the 3 GW mark firmly in sight. At tele.net’s 9th Annual Conference on Data Centres in India, held in Mumbai in April 2026, Surajit Chatterjee, Managing Director and Head of Data Centres, CapitaLand Investment, spoke on India’s capacity expansion, the evolving nature of customer-led design, the coexistence of self-build and co-location, and the path to consolidation. Edited excerpts from his remarks…
Scale and go-to-market strategy
CapitaLand Data Centre is now in its sixth year in India, building 245 MW of capacity across Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Mumbai is already completely leased out. Our aim is to reach 600-700 MW over the next three to five years, and we have chosen our markets carefully. From a go-to-market standpoint, we focus approximately 70 per cent on hyperscalers and 30 per cent on enterprise, with specific emphasis on banking, insurance and e-commerce. In the hyperscale space, we are increasingly focused on Build-to-Adapt – our approach to built-to-suit – and on liquid cooling as a technology imperative.
Design complexity and the customer-led challenge
Design is one of the industry’s most dynamic challenges. Customer requirements evolve rapidly, and the critical question for every operator is whether they have the ground-level capability to adapt as those requirements shift. Power approvals take time, build timelines are long and both are running in parallel. What is encouraging is that OEMs, operators, design consultants and the government are increasingly at the same table, working collectively to make delivery faster and more viable.
Self-build and co-location are not in competition
There was a period of concern that if hyperscaler self-builds continued to grow rapidly, co-location growth would suffer. However, these two are running in parallel. Self-builds serve a different purpose and require longer lead times to go live. Co-location is faster to execute. Workloads are being divided accordingly. As a global data centre player with presence in Singapore, China and Europe, we have existing hyperscaler relationships that form our India strategy. But the enterprise space, particularly banking, insurance, e-commerce and IT, given the volume of artificial intelligence deployment and content creation happening behind the scenes, is a segment that has real potential to scale.
New geographies and the metropolitan
opportunity
Every operator will eventually encounter the natural limits of metropolitan infrastructure. The Visakhapatnam announcement is an early signal of how new geographies are opening up, and we expect this trend to continue. A greenfield project in India today, from land acquisition to power sourcing, takes 26-30 months. Greater coordination between operators, utilities and the government is beginning to push that in the right direction. The operators who will define the next phase are those who plan early, move with speed and adopt the right technologies ahead of demand.
Consolidation will be multidimensional
Consolidation will happen, but it will not have a single flavour. There are two dimensions: how investors choose to consolidate – spreading across markets or going deeper in fewer locations – and where operators elect to expand next. With roughly 22-25 significant players today, each working within a defined scope, the first meaningful phase of consolidation is likely to become visible around 2030.
Sustainability as an investment thesis
Our approach is twofold: fulfilling client sustainability requirements through power purchase agreements and captive set-ups, while investing directly in the renewable sector to generate a revenue model from it. Two years ago, we commissioned our first solar power plant in Chennai with 25 MW, serving our office and commercial assets. For us, sustainability is not only about serving the data centre industry. It is about creating an infrastructure layer that adds value across our multiple asset classes in India, spanning data centres, the commercial space and logistics.
We are here to help shape the infrastructure foundation that India’s digital economy will run on; through AI-ready design, liquid cooling at scale, and a Build-to-Adapt approach that keeps pace with how technology and customer requirements continue to evolve. The opportunity ahead is significant. So is the responsibility that comes with it.
