CapitaLand India Trust to acquire Chennai site for Rs 832.8 mn

CHENNAI: CapitaLand India Trust Management Pte Ltd., the trustee-manager of CapitaLand India Trust (CLINT), is acquiring a 4.01-acre freehold site in Ambattur, Chennai for Rs 832.8 million (approximately $14.1 million) to develop its third data centre in India.

CLINT will invest an estimated Rs 19.4 billion (approximately S$328.8 million) to acquire the site and develop a data centre in phases over the next four to five years.

The data centre will have a power capacity of 55 megawatts (MW) to host customers such as global technology giants and cloud service providers, as well as large domestic enterprise clients.

The acquisition of the site is expected to be completed by December 2022. The data centre is scheduled to be completed by end-2025.

Sanjeev Dasgupta, CEO, CLINT, said: “With this latest acquisition, CLINT will have a presence in India’s key data centre markets – Navi Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai, and we are also planning to develop a fourth data centre in Bangalore. This will allow us to expand in the resilient and highly scalable data centre asset class, diversify our data centre portfolio geographically, and enable us to better serve our customers across the country. Noting that India’s data consumption and demand for information technology (IT) solutions are fast expanding, he said the country has one of the world’s lowest data centre densities. We will be developing a data centre in Navi Mumbai and another two data centres within our international tech parks in Bangalore and Hyderabad.”

Patrick Boocock, CEO, Private Equity Alternative Assets, CapitaLand Investment (CLI), who also oversees the growth of CLI’s global data centre business, said: “CLI has been seeing rising investor interest in the digital infrastructure sector and we are actively working on a pipeline of data centre deals across Asia. India is a particularly interesting market; in the last five years, $14 billion has been invested in India data centre sector, and the amount is expected to cross $20 billion by 2025. CapitaLand’s strong core competencies in data centre design, development and operations will enable us to seize opportunities in the country as we build our new economy portfolio globally.”

Demand for data centres in India is rising due to improving technology infrastructure and increasing adoption of new technologies like 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud and the Internet of Things. These factors are expected to expand India’s total data centre capacity to 1,580 MW by 2026 at a compound annual growth rate of 22%. Chennai is India’s second largest data centre co-location market with current IT load capacity of 88 MW (about 12% share of India’s total capacity4).

Surajit Chatterjee, MD, Data Centre, India, CLI, said: “The acquisition site is in a prime data centre location in Ambattur, close to sea cable landing stations, reliable power supply and has a well-developed infrastructure. When fully developed, the data centre will have the capacity to host approximately 4,900 racks and operate at an efficient power usage effectiveness of approximately 1.45. The data centre will adopt sustainable design principles and green building standards. These include features such as intelligent energy management systems and solar panels.”

The acquisition and development of the data centre in Chennai will increase CLINT’s total portfolio size (inclusive of committed investment pipeline) by 1.7% from approximately 25.3 million square feet to approximately 25.7 million square feet.