Hiranandani to invest ₹1000 crore to set up first data centre

Being built over 18 acre land parcel, the company’s first data centre park called ‘Yotta’ would comprise 5 buildings with a total size of around 30 lakh sqft.

“This year we are looking at putting about ₹1000 crore into our first data centre in Panvel," said Niranjan Hiranandani, founder and managing director, Hiranandani Group. Spread across 820,000 sqft, the first centre of 7200 racks with 50 MW would be operational by December 2019.

H-Energy Pvt Ltd, the oil and gas arm of the Group, will provide the power requirements to operate the data centre parks. The energy vertical is managed by Hiranandani’s Dubai-based son Darshan Hiranandani, who is also the chief executive officer of the group.

“There are certain necessities of talents and expertise required to get into this business. First we have land, we are capable of construction , we have built data centres in the past, besides we have expertise of H-Energy. We are bringing all the expertise under one platform to build the largest and most cost effective data centre in the country," Hiranandani said.

The government Digital India campaign along with the growth of Internet of Things (IoT), big data and artificial intelligence have opened up a huge opportunity for setting such data centres in the country. Besides, the growth of e-commerce firms have also expanded the need of having large organised data centres.

The Mumbai-based developer is also gearing up to launch similar data centre parks in Chennai and in other part of Mumbai as well. While the first park is being built as part of an existing integrated township Fortune City at Panvel, construction in the Chennai park would start from March next year.

The company has also roped in Sunil Gupta, former executive director and president of Netmagic as managing partner and chief executive officer of the new business vertical.

“We shall offer practically unlimited scalability of Colocation space and Power at our Data Centre parks to OTT players like Google, AWS, Microsoft, Alibaba, Tencent , Netflix, Facebook , Apple etc. for their cloud availability zones / clusters, for better manageability of their operations and enhanced cost effectiveness," Gupta said.

In the recent past, Hiranandani Group has also diversified into warehousing and logistics park business. The company has been in talks with strategic partners to launched its first warehousing park spread across 5 million sq. ft, on a 250-acre plot it owns in Pune. In an interview with Mint, Hiranandani had said the plan is to create a new industrial warehousing business worth up to ₹3,000 crore over the next two-three years.