How Mumbai Keeps Winning India’s Data-Centre Race

The entertainment capital, the finance capital — and now the data centre capital of India. Mumbai hosts the country’s densest data-centre footprint, and the gap is widening.

Cushman & Wakefield’s India Data Centre H1 2025 Update places Mumbai’s operational capacity at 594 MW, with another 337 MW under construction and 852 MW planned. 

That pipeline alone represents 41% of India’s upcoming data centre supply and could push national installed capacity beyond 4,100 MW by 2030. 

Chennai ranks second, roughly accounting for 13% of planned capacity and about 15% of operational capacity.

But why is Mumbai leading? 

Connectivity Sets the Baseline

A prime reason is that Mumbai is the country’s financial capital, and many BFSI-related workloads are hosted there.

Moreover, because RBI’s and SEBI’s data regulations from 2018 and 2023, respectively, require that this data be stored domestically, and considering latency requirements, Mumbai is the optimal location for data centres.

The city includes numerous well-established players, such as Yotta, Sify, STT GDC, and others, who have built AI-ready data centres equipped with leading-edge GPUs and other necessary hardware.

The city’s data centre growth is organised around three clusters: Powai, the Thane–Belapur Road corridor, and Panvel. 

Powai is the most mature, anchored by established colocation operators and proximity to financial and IT enterprises. 

The Thane–Belapur Road belt, spanning Airoli, Rabale, and Mahape, has become Mumbai’s primary growth engine, accounting for roughly 70% of the city’s built capacity. 

With vacancy near 6% and a development pipeline of about 982 MW, the corridor is set to drive the next phase of expansion.

Besides, connectivity is the most obvious reason. Modern data centres function less as isolated facilities and more as nodes in a global network. Mumbai already serves as India’s primary international landing point for data traffic. Thirteen subsea cable systems land in the city today, with three more under development, linking India directly to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia.

Those cables carry financial transactions, cloud workloads, media distribution, and enterprise traffic that cannot tolerate latency or routing uncertainty. 

This March, Bharti Airtel announced that it has landed the 2Africa Pearls cable in Mumbai, connecting India to Africa and Europe via the Middle East. 

Mumbai’s landing stations feed directly into onshore clusters across Powai, Mahape, and Navi Mumbai. 

Cost, Pricing, and Why Demand Holds

Mumbai’s economics is often misunderstood. Land prices are among the highest in the country, but total build economics remain competitive by global standards.

The Data Centre Construction Cost Index assigns Mumbai a score of 0.60—lower than Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul. Only Shanghai ranks cheaper.

Cushman & Wakefield’s rental data shows how that plays out within the country. 

Monthly colocation pricing per kW in Mumbai ranges from ₹8,000–12,000 for sub-250 kW deployments, ₹7,000–10,000 for 250 kW–1 MW deployments, and ₹6,000–7,500 for deployments above 5 MW.

That is higher than emerging markets such as Kolkata or Pune, where large-scale deployments above 5 MW often price closer to ₹6,000–6,500. 

Besides, the cost to acquire land and site for a five-acre land parcel with 50 MW capacity in the prime region of Powai in Mumbai is the highest in the country.

As a Sify spokesperson told AIM, “Mumbai’s position as India’s financial capital makes it an inevitable location for data centre deployment despite high land costs. The greater upfront capex is offset by stronger commercial offtake.” 

On scaling despite constraints, the spokesperson added, “Most new facilities are concentrated in the suburbs, where operators can optimise footprints while staying close to key demand clusters.”

Demand Is No Longer Narrow

The demand supporting that offtake has broadened.

Amit Agrawal, president at Techno Digital, a company that builds AI-ready data centres, pointed to sectors rarely concentrated in one geography—film studios, production houses, theatres, fintech teams, and streaming platforms. 

“Everywhere I look, I see opportunity because everything is being digitised today,” he told AIM, describing how VFX, editing, content creation, and fintech workflows increasingly rely on AI and automation.

His argument was that Mumbai’s compute demand now runs in multiple directions at once. Creative pipelines, financial automation, enterprise AI, and cloud platforms compete for the same infrastructure.

“Some players build pure infrastructure. Some offer infrastructure as a service. Others run cloud and application layers. All of them find customers because use cases differ,” Agrawal said.

Policy and Utilisation

Furthermore, policy has added predictability to that growth.

Maharashtra’s IT/ITES Policy 2023 grants electricity-duty exemptions, designates data centres as essential services for 24×7 operations, offers full stamp-duty exemptions on land purchases, relaxes building norms, and routes approvals through the MAHITI single-window system. 

Sify Infinit Spaces Limited’s (SISL) DRHP also references state-backed digital initiatives, including AI Centres of Excellence and large private hyperscale programmes.

Despite uneven micro-market behaviour, tight vacancy in Thane–Belapur and Powai, and more slack in Panvel, Mumbai remains the most reliable environment for long-term utilisation. 

Even as data centre operators such as SISL say that nearly 70% of the power used at their Rabale campus in neighbouring Navi Mumbai comes from renewable sources, the broader Mumbai metropolitan region continues to face periodic power and water stress.

As investments in data centres scale, often backed by policy assurances of uninterrupted electricity and water, it is critical that such guarantees do not come at the expense of supply to the city’s residents.

“Everybody wants to come to Mumbai. But today, the city’s peak power requirement is about 3 GW, and we are already talking about the Thane–Belapur Road coming up with nearly 1 GW of total data centre capacity,” said Agrawal. 

Pointing at the scale of the challenge such growth would create, he said, “Just imagine a 15-kilometre stretch consuming one-third of the power of the entire Mumbai city. Are we ready for that? We are not.”

“Data centres will go farther from the cities wherever there is availability of power,” added Agrawal, pointing towards the expansion of the ecosystem in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

The post How Mumbai Keeps Winning India’s Data-Centre Race appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

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