Is India Building Enough To Power Its Digital Transformation

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CHART-10: COLO CAPACITY ACROSS NATIONS VERSUS MOBILE DATA CONSUMPTION

GROWTH DRIVERS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS How does India compare with other nations on the DC market drivers? Key parameters that we that we believe as useful benchmas India against some of the key economies of the world: Colo installed capacity vs mobile data consumption Penetration of internet, smartphones, OTT, and social media The digital adoption growth story of India The pace of Colo capacity addition Construction cost for DCs

PetaBy / MW

13.2

0.3

4.5

1.1

18.8

0.8

2.8

0.1

0.4

0.3

Mobile data consumption (petaB/Month)

IT Load (MW)

8,150

16,000

7,150

14,000

6,150

12,000

5,150

10,000

MegaWatt

4,150

8,000

3,150

6,000

2,150

4,000 petaByte/Month

1,150

2,000

150

0

A review of all these parameters would begin the process of finding an answer to:

Why India needs to ramp up its Colo DC project delivery speed?

Is the ongoing capacity addition enough to mitigate the current problem of under penetration?

Australia

China

France

India

Indonesia

Japan

S.Korea

Singapore

USA

UK

Source: Cushman & Wakefield analysis

Why India needs to ramp up its Colo DC project delivery speed?

The PetaByte/MW ratio can be a considered a strong metric for understanding Colo data center penetration in any country. In this graph, India’s high PB/MW ratio suggests that the installed capacity is insufficient compared to other nations. Despite generating a large amount of data through mobile phones, India’s installed Colo capacity needs to be improved. More capacity is required to match up to nations such as China, which is the nearest comparable. To elaborate on the graph above: With approximately 13,000 Petabytes (PB) of mobile data generated through smartphones, India’s data generation is comparable only to that of another densely populated nation, China. However, with an installed Colo capacity of merely 977 MW (as of Q4 2023), 13.2 PB of data is being serviced in India for every 1 MW of installed colo capacity. In contrast, China’s PB/MW ratio is merely 4.5, indicating a much better DC market penetration. China has an installed Colo capacity of more than three times that of India. India’s PB/MW ratio is higher than that of most countries except Indonesia. Given the heightened delivery speed of upcoming Colo DC projects in India, the PB/MW ratio is expected to remain lower than in Indonesia, even though the latter will add substantial IT capacity over the forecast period.

In the previous chapter, we demonstrated that the addition of DC Colo capacity has been accelerating in India year after year. Despite this, India still needs to catch up with other comparable nations, where capacity addition has reached a healthy level relative to the amount of data generated through their internet or cell phone users. The metric used to measure or compare Colo DC penetration across countries is the ratio of data generation through mobile phones to the installed Colo capacity in the country. The total data generated is measured in Petabytes, and this ratio provides us with a PB/MW metric for evaluating the penetration of Colo data centers across countries. A lower PB/MW ratio would indicate that the penetration of Colo data centers is healthy and vice versa. We examined this ratio for prominent countries in both the advanced and emerging world, and it was not surprising to notice a significant potential for the growth of Colo capacity in India, Indonesia, and, to a lesser extent, China.

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