Japan’s NTT lands subsea cable in city; plans renewable energy units

CHENNAI: Global data centre major NTT group, while expanding in major Indian cities, is also looking at tier two cities to build centres besides setting up captive renewable power projects in India and buying from others, said a top official.

He also said the subsea cable system MIST, with a capacity of nearly 200 TBPS of data, had landed in Chennai. Currently, the NTT group has 16 data centres operational in four cities - Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Noida, near Delhi. The group is building 11 more data centres in the above four cities and in Kolkata.

“We are getting into tier two cities like Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Bhopal and others. We have identified land parcels,” Sharad Sanghi, chairman, NTT Global Data Centres & Cloud Infrastructure India Pvt Ltd told media launching a new data centre here. Sanghi said a typical data centre would involve an investment of about $100-150 million and NTT will be investing about $300 million in its data centre in Chennai - one completed and one under construction.

He said NTT had announced an investment of $2 billion four years back and the outlay for the Chennai centre is part of that. The group is investing about $500 million a year. According to him, India ranks number three in terms of business for NTT globally and will soon go higher up as the potential is large.

Globally the $108 billion Japanese group is present in 20 countries with 1,900 MW IT load and over 1,000 MW additional planned. Sanghi said the group commands 22 per cent data centre market share in India. The capacity utilisation of the data centres is at about 70-80 per cent. Queried about the group’s renewable energy plans, he said the focus is on solar and solar-wind hybrid plants.

The group also will buy power from renewable sources. Shekhar Sharma, CEO-MD, added the IT load of the existing data centres is about 204 MW and by March 2024 it will go up to 349.2 MW owing to expansions. He said if one takes into account the current and future planned, the additional IT load will be 526.4 MW taking the total for NTT in India to 821.8 MW. The officials said the MIST (Malaysia, India, Singapore and Thailand) subsea cable-the first cable system for the NTT group-will provide direct connectivity to and from India. The subsea cable spans 8,100 km and will connect the above four countries. It is also the first cable landing of a 12-fibre pair capacity, capable of carrying over 200 TBPS of data, NTT said.