Reliance Industries Limited (“RIL”) today announced entering into an agreement to invest alongside Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty in their Indian SPVs set up for developing data centers in India. RIL will hold 33.33% stake in each of the Indian SPVs and become an equal partner.
Mercury Holdings SG Pte. Ltd. (Mercury Holdings) is a 50:50 joint venture between Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty for development and operations of high-quality, scalable data centres in India through SPVs. Mercury Holdings, through its wholly-owned subsidiary in Singapore, namely, Mercury India SG FDI Pte. Ltd. holds 100% of the following five Indian companies:
a) BAM DLR Data Center Services Pvt. Ltd.;
b) BAM DLR Chennai Pvt. Ltd.;
c) BAM DLR Kolkata Pvt. Ltd.;
d) BAM DLR Mumbai Pvt. Ltd.; and
e) BAM DLR Network Services Pvt. Ltd
(collectively Indian SPVs)
RIL has entered into an agreement with (i) Mercury Holdings; (ii) Mercury India SG FDI Pte. Ltd.; and (iii) each of the Indian SPVs for investing an aggregate amount of Rs.378 crore.
The Company has also committed to invest further amounts in equity and debt securities of the Indian SPVs and any other new SPV that may be set up by Mercury India SG FDI Pte. Ltd. upto an amount not exceeding Rs. 622 crore, as and when calls are made.
Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (“Digital Realty”) is the largest provider of cloud and carrier-neutral data center, colocation and interconnection solutions globally with 300+ data centers across 27 countries. They have a joint venture (“JV”) with Brookfield Infrastructure that is developing high quality, highly-connected, scalable data centers to meet the critical infrastructure needs of enterprises and digital services companies in India.
RIL will become an equal partner in the JV. The JV will be branded as ‘Digital Connexion: A Brookfield, Jio and Digital Realty Company’. The JV is currently developing data centers in marquee locations of Chennai and Mumbai.
The JV’s first 20 megawatt (MW) greenfield data center (MAA10), on a 100 MW campus in Chennai, is expected to be completed by the end of 2023. The JV recently announced the acquisition of 2.15 acres of land in Mumbai, to build a 40 MW data center.
Given the location of these sites, the data centers will be connected to critical terrestrial connectivity infrastructure, as well as undersea cables, and will become hubs for global connectivity for Indian companies and gateways into India for multi-national companies.
Data center capacity in India is expected to increase multi-fold over the next few years. Indians are already amongst the largest mobile data consumers globally. This will further increase significantly with increasing access to various digital services like OTT platforms and gaming and the ongoing 5G roll-out. Adoption of 5G use cases by enterprises will lead to the adoption of data-intensive technologies like internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI).
The ongoing innovations in generative AI technology have been enabled by hardware and data center infrastructure, and the requirement of these is only set to increase exponentially. There is also an increased emphasis on localization of personal data within the country. These drivers will significantly increase the data center and compute capacity requirements of the country.
The JV will be well positioned to serve global and local enterprises, SMBs and the vibrant startups of India, for their cloud and colocation requirements as they move their compute resources on the cloud and off-premise.
Data centers developed by the JV will leverage Digital Realty’s industry-leading energy-efficient data center platform design and operating procedures, highly-repeatable Pervasive Data Center Architecture (PDx®) approach and relationships with global customers, Brookfield’s in-depth knowledge of the Indian infrastructure market, and Jio’s massive digital and connectivity ecosystem and very strong enterprise relationships with an existing client base of 80% of large named private enterprises in India.
Jio’s world class, all-IP, data strong, future proof, 4G and 5G connectivity network with deep fiber presence, covering ~99.5% of the Indian population, strategically expands the JV’s connectivity to data centers and other establishments in the country. It extends the reach of PlatformDIGITAL®, Digital Realty’s best-in-class global data center platform with 300+ data centers, in 50+ metros, across 27 countries and 6 continents, giving customers access to a dense connected data community of partners, solutions and services, including Jio’s network, cloud and other service solutions in India.
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