Digital Realty, the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions, and Brookfield Infrastructure L.P. (‘Brookfield Infrastructure’) have announced an agreement to establish a 50/50 joint venture focused on the development, ownership and operation of institutional quality data centres in India. The joint venture will operate under the brand name ‘BAM Digital Realty’.
With a population of over 1.4 billion, the world’s fifth-largest economy in terms of GDP and an expanding focus on the digital delivery of services, India represents a key market opportunity to extend coverage, capacity and connectivity options for the world’s leading service providers as well as local and global enterprise customers. India is a high-growth market, with data centre demand expected to significantly increase, driven by rapidly growing data consumption, digitisation of the economy, the onset of 5G and data localisation trends.
The joint venture is positioned to enable the significant expansion of PlatformDIGITAL, Digital Realty’s premier global data centre platform which supports the evolving data, control and networking demands of global enterprises. Its deployment across India is expected to enable customers to rapidly scale Digital Transformation by deploying critical infrastructure with a leading global data centre provider at the heart of a growing connected data community in India. Data centres developed in India will leverage Digital Realty’s industry-leading energy-efficient data center design and operating procedures and highly repeatable Pervasive Data Center Architecture (PDx) approach for the new digital workplace.
“India is a rapidly emerging data centre market and offers a bright future, with accelerating adoption of digital business models among a population that recognises the role of technology for future economic development,” said Digital Realty Chief Executive Officer, A. William Stein. “Our existing partnership with Brookfield, our Ascenty platform across Latin America, has already delivered long-term value to our customers, with over 250 MW of IT load capacity in Brazil, Chile and Mexico either fully built-out or currently under construction. We look forward to building upon our successful partnership with Brookfield by entering the Indian data centre market together and extending opportunities for Digital Transformation with the global consistency of PlatformDIGITAL.”
The joint venture will expand Brookfield Infrastructure’s significant global data infrastructure portfolio, which currently includes US$23 billion in assets across data transmission, distribution and storage, including a portfolio of 139,000 operational telecom wireless towers in India, which it intends to expand to 175,000 over the near term. Brookfield has over a decade of experience investing in India, with approximately US$20 billion of assets under management including infrastructure, renewable power, real estate and private equity.
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