India towards Self-Reliance in Digital Economy with launch of Yotta Data Centre by Hiranandani Group

Asia’s largest Data Centre YOTTA NM1 goes live at Hiranandani Fortune City, Panvel, Navi Mumbai 

Mumbai, July 11, 2020: India’s largest Data Center building, Yotta NM1, the largest Tier IV Data Center, certified by Uptime Institute in Asia, and the second largest in the world was inaugurated in the virtual presence of Shri Uddhav Thackeray, Hon. Chief Minister, Maharashtra; Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Hon. Minister for Communications, Electronics & Information Technology and Law & Justice, Govt. of India and Shri Subhash Desai, Hon. Minister of Industries and Mining, Govt. of Maharashtra.

What makes the Yotta story unique is our ownership of all key input resources, massive economies of scale with our land banks, captive green energy generation and distribution capabilities and unmatched expertise and experience in Data Center domain including design, engineering, construction and operations, said Dr. Niranjan Hiranandani, MD and Co-founder, Hiranandani Group.

“This Data Center is a global pioneer not just in terms of capability and price but more so in terms of its focus on efficiency and sustainability. We provide the most efficient power offering available in the market today – not just the lowest price of power but also a Power Usage Efficiency or PUE that is a global benchmark for the tropics,” said Darshan Hiranandani, Group CEO – Hiranandani Group.

Being an industry leader is also about being ahead of the curve, and when it comes to diversifying into the segment of data centres, the MD and co-founder, Hiranandani Group has timed it to perfection. In the second half of 2019, he announced setting up of Yotta Infrastructure, a Hiranandani Group subsidiary and a Managed Data Centre Service Provider, which would develop hyper-scale data centre parks in India.

For a real estate developer better known for its integrated townships to foray into the shared data centre space may have raised questions in mid-2019, but it has been a story of right timing and leveraging the right set of tech-specs which made the project future-ready. Originally seen as a segment of commercial real estate where the primary activity was to build and lease buildings to corporates to store their data, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen an upsurge of end-users from different segments, including e-commerce, online banking, entertainment, education and OTT.

The Initial stage is termed as Phase zero (0). The plan is to migrate to renewables and gas-based combined heat and power generation on site will provide chilled water at the most efficient cost structure possible and will bring design PUE numbers down to 1.2 – again unheard of in Indian weather conditions. But the plan does not stop there; it includes building facilities today to ensure that can be future ready, to run 100 per cent on renewables whether offsite through solar and wind coupled with on-site Hydrogen based co-generation and fuel cells in the future.

Dr. Niranjan Hiranandani has ambitious plans of potentially investing about ₹ 3500 crores in datacenter business across Navi Mumbai, Chennai to begin with. The group has already made Rs 1000crs investment in its first data centre going live at our Hiranandani Fortune City township in Panvel. He attributes the initial interest in the segment to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who spoke about a ‘digital India’; a ‘Make in India’; data to be located and stored in India and plans to achieve a $5 trillion economy. The past couple of years had seen these aspects take the data centre space to growth levels of over 100 per cent year-on-year.

This prompted setting up of the 100 per cent subsidiary of the Hiranandani Group, Yotta, which will offer hyper-density, hyper-scalable data centre and co-location solutions to enterprises with supporting managed IT, hybrid multi cloud and security services. The Group already has the expertise for building data centres, it has the land suitable for data centres as also the most important – expertise of power efficiency. These put together, will create efficiency-plus data centres, with operating costs estimated to reduce by 20 per cent.

Beginning with Panvel, where Yotta’s growth plans began with building of the data centre park – the country’s largest, spread over 18 acres, comprising five data centres and 30,000 racks. Amidst projections at the time Dr. Niranjan Hiranandani announced setting up of Yotta, which showed huge demand for data centres in the near future, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen a sharp spike in quantum of data centre spaces, and Yotta, its start-up stage at the first such building in Panvel, has been able to handle the quantum leap in demand for data centre spaces.

The COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown and work from home (WFH) have multiplied digital and online transactions, these all reflect in incremental demand at data centers, be it to power collaborative tools like Zoom; usage of enterprise tools like SAP or net banking, as also on the consumer side, OTT platforms for entertainment like Netflix, Hotstar etc. There is a 30 to 30 per cent hike in data center capacity usage, and even after the situation returns to ‘normal’, the work style will continue to be data center driven, and demand growth will continue.

As enterprises and Government agencies now focus more than ever before on Self-Reliance (“Atmanirbhar”) in their supply chains within the country, this has also lead to more emphasis on data privacy/protection and consequently on data localisation.

The demand for hyper-scale data centers is on the rise, thanks to Governments push for the National E-commerce Policy and proposed policy on Data Center Parks. Also, with the new normal established due to COVID, reliance on technology from enterprises and consumers has increased. All these factors together make for a tremendous growth story for data centers in India.

What makes the Yotta story unique is the Hiranandani Group’s ownership of all key input resources, massive economies of scale with our land banks, captive green energy generation and distribution capabilities and unmatched expertise and experience in Data Center domain including design, engineering, construction and operations.

Data Centers are a ‘sunrise’ segment in Indian commercial real estate, and it shows potential to grow at a fast pace. Sectors such as BFSI, logistics, transportation, e-commerce, media and entertainment as also government agencies are driving high demand for data centers. For the team at Yotta, the formal inauguration caps on-going negotiations with a large number of potential users, these should get implemented once the lockdown is truly lifted and ‘normalcy’ returns to the Indian economy.

Corporate Comm India (CCI Newswire)