Mumbai, Bengaluru: Hyperscalers and large companies are increasingly booking data centre capacity before facilities are ready, with pre-leased capacity more than doubling in a year as demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud infrastructure outpaces new supply.
Pre-leased data centre capacity rose to around 1.2 gigawatts (GW) as of June 2026, from around 550 megawatts (MW) a year earlier, according to data published in a 23 August report by real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield. The data centre capacity refers to the amount of computing infrastructure a data centre can support, measured by the power available to run IT equipment.
Pre-leasing, or early booking of under-construction data centres, is an established practice worldwide. In India, for example, Adani Enterprises Ltd, one of the country’s largest industrial conglomerates, has bet on 1GW of cumulative data centre capacity, anchored by hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google.
The rush to secure capacity reflects the growing demand for AI and cloud infrastructure in India. Companies are committing earlier because data centres take time to build, with land, power connectivity, approvals and construction all adding to the time needed to bring new capacity online.
“Supply of data centre capacity takes more time because large data centres require land, power connectivity, approvals and significant construction periods,” said Vinish Bawa, a partner at consultancy PwC India. “This is encouraging customers to commit to capacity earlier rather than wait for facilities to become operational,” he added.
The rise in data centre utilization has made India “Asia's fastest-growing data centre market, driven by hyperscale investments, AI workloads, and transformative tax incentives,” according to a 31 August note by real estate consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) India. The Indian government is offering a tax holiday until 2047 for foreign cloud service providers that use Indian data centre infrastructure.
India's data centre capacity stood at 1.7GW as of June 2026, according to Cushman & Wakefield, and is expected to reach 5.6GW by 2030 at a 33% annualized growth rate.
Strong demand
While pre-leased capacity has doubled, vacancies at operational data centres have also fallen to very low levels, underscoring strong demand for existing capacity. Only 2.8% of the country’s operational data centres remained vacant, according to Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) India.
Further, 100MW of information technology (IT) capacity was sold to cloud-service clients between January and June 2026, while 84.9MW was operationalized during the same period.
Demand is being driven by rising smartphone use and consumer AI applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. In February, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said ChatGPT had over 100 million weekly active users in the country, underlining the need for local data storage and processing capabilities.
“Record-low vacancy rates and massive pre-commitments are creating enterprise supply constraints while attracting unprecedented foreign capital for self-build facilities. Sustainability initiatives, robust policy frameworks, and renewable energy expansion are cementing India's role as a strategic global leader in AI-ready infrastructure," according to a note by Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) India.
Over the past 12 months, Indian conglomerates, standalone operators and big tech firms such as Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Google have cumulatively committed more than $250 billion to build data centres, according to Mint research.
Strategic necessity
The Cushman & Wakefield report said the emergence of pre-leasing as a key part of the data centre economy is now a “strategic necessity”, enabling occupiers to secure power, accelerate deployment timelines and access purpose-built infrastructure in an increasingly supply-constrained market.
Companies concur. Surajit Chatterjee, managing director and head of data centres for India at CapitaLand Investment Ltd, a unit of Singapore-based real estate firm CapitaLand Group, said the company has already pre-leased “about 53% of the approximately 200MW of gross power capacity across our three data centres under development in Navi Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai".
“Three years ago, customers typically contracted for capacity close to when a facility was ready for service. Today, conversations on large requirements begin at the land and power planning stage, and commitments are increasingly being signed before construction is completed,” he added.
However, the addition of over 600MW of pre-leased data centre contracts may not all come into operation at once, said Kashyap Kompella, founder of tech consultancy firm RPA2AI Research.
“The conversion rate would be around 350-550MW of data centre capacity per year. The ramp-up is unlikely to be linear, as projects will be commissioned in phases and different pre-leased facilities are at different stages of development,” he said.
Mint's queries emailed to AdaniConneX, Larsen & Toubro, Bharti Airtel, Yotta Data Services, STT Global Data Centres India, NTT Data, Sify Technologies and Anant Raj remained unanswered.
A note of caution
While pre-leasing is a strong indicator of the sector’s overall health and potential to generate returns, Kompella cautioned that it is “better understood as contracted future capacity that should progressively move into operation over the next 24-36 months.''
Another cause for caution is that current demand for AI may force companies to overpay for early access to capacity, according to David Cushman, executive research leader at HFS Research.
"AI demand is absorbing new supply before it opens, meaning the practical risk for an enterprise is not overpaying but being unable to secure capacity at all,” HFS Research's Cushman said in a 20 August note.
For now, though, most expect pre-leasing of data centres in India to continue rising. While Bawa labelled future demand “strong”, Kompella affirmed that pre-leasing is likely to remain “significant” going forward.