MUMBAI/BENGALURU: Billionaire Gautam Adani’s data centre bet is already bigger than those of its biggest corporate rivals combined as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom spurs India’s business houses to diversify into computing infrastructure as the new investment avenue.
Adani Enterprises Ltd (AEL) has invested about ₹8,379 crore in AdaniConneX, its data centre joint venture with EdgeConneX, since entering the sector in 2021. This is almost double the combined investments of at least ₹4,673 crore so far by Bharti Airtel Ltd, Reliance Industries Ltd and Tata Group—the other major listed Indian corporate groups—in their data centre ventures, according to Mint’s analysis of company filings.
Tata’s investments
The , which is the country’s biggest business house, has so far invested at least ₹1,447 crore through two companies. Tata Communications Ltd has invested about ₹1,247 crore in STT Global Data Centres since 2016, according to the company’s annual filings. STT has an operational data centre capacity of over 400 MW.
Tata Consultancy Services Ltd has invested at least ₹200 crore in HyperVault Data Centres Pvt Ltd, its data centre venture, according to its FY26 annual report.
The four conglomerates have been in the data centre business for very different lengths of time. Airtel’s Nxtra was established in 2013, giving it a head start of several years over others, while Reliance’s Digital Connexion was formed in 2023.
is the newest entrant, having set up HyperVault jointly with private equity firm TPG in 2025. The differing timelines partly explain the gap in cumulative investment even as all four are now stepping up their plans to capture AI-driven demand.
“These large conglomerates have muscle power and have strong cash generation,” said Amit Chandra, vice-president of research at HDFC Securities. “They can put in large amounts of money and wait for a long period of time for the return of investments. Capital allocation power decides who is in this for the long haul.”
Each big business house has attributed the heavy spending on data centres to the rise of AI tools and the need to data in-house. Adani’s spending was reflected in chairman Gautam Adani’s comments in the company’s FY26 annual report.
“We understood then that the coming age of AI would demand far more than algorithms. It would require massive data centres, reliable power, strong transmission networks, cooling systems, connectivity, clean energy and industrial-scale resilience,” Gautam Adani said in the annual report.
Long-term opportunity
For Airtel, India’s digitization drive presented an opportunity.
“India’s rapid digitization, rising cloud adoption and increasing data localization requirements make this a compelling long-term opportunity,” Bharti Enterprises chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said in the FY26 annual report.
Reliance chairman Ambani said that “building India’s first built-to-suit AI data centre for a global technology leader of Meta’s scale demonstrates India’s readiness to be at the forefront of the global AI revolution.”
TCS’s management voiced a similar opinion.
“Beyond the campus, the project is expected to catalyze India’s AI infrastructure ecosystem across power, cooling, networking, construction, engineering and operations,” TCS said in an exchange filing dated 5 September.
The investment rush reflects a fundamental shift in India’s data centre market. For years, specialist data centre operators including STT Global Data Centres, Yotta Data Services and Sify Infinit Spaces added capacity largely in response to demand from cloud providers, enterprises and telecom companies.
Analysts said conglomerates might edge out standalone operators.
“Each of these conglomerates has deep pockets. As demand continues to pick up, most of them are likely to infuse more capital into their data centre businesses,” said Ayush Rungta, partner at Deloitte India. “The inflection point from a demand perspective should happen soon, and once that happens, we could see more and more money being pumped into these businesses.”
“Conglomerates can combine land, power generation, transmission, fibre, construction, financing and data centre operations, potentially reducing development time and improving control over costs,” Vinish Bawa, a partner at PwC, said, adding that risks pertaining to underutilization persist and that investments backed by hyperscalers are more justified.
AdaniConneX and TCS are reportedly expected to house 5 GW and 1 GW of data centre capacity by 2035 and 2028, respectively, whereas Airtel Nxtra is expected to have 1 GW of capacity in the “next few years.”
Reliance expects 168 MW of capacity in its data centre with Meta by 2028 whereas Digital Connexion’s 1 GW data centre in Visakhapatnam is expected to be ready by 2030.