Bharti Airtel turns to Mumbai to chase 1GW data centre dream and 25% market share
ADVERTISEMENT
Bharti Airtel is making Mumbai the cornerstone of its next growth phase as it embarks on an aggressive expansion of its data centre business to 1 gigawatt (GW). Speaking during the company's Q1FY27 earnings call, Vice Chairman Gopal Vittal said Airtel plans to expand its Nxtra data centre capacity nearly eightfold—from 120-130 megawatts (MW) to 1 gigawatt (GW) over the next few years—while doubling its market share from around 12% to 25%.
He said the telco's one of the growth bets is data centre business. "The business is on a strong growth trajectory with sustained revenue growth. We believe that our market share here at about 12% is clearly low for the large heft and size that we have as a company. We are working towards our ambition to build 1GW in the next few years," Vittal said.
The expansion will trigger a fresh investment cycle for the telecom operator.
"Many of the investments over the next couple of years will continue to rapidly scale up our data centre portfolio as we are building out from the 120-130 megawatts all the way to a gigawatt. There is going to be a period of rapid capital expenditure spend," he added.
For Airtel, the road to 1 GW runs through Mumbai. Vittal said a large share of hyperscaler and domestic enterprise workloads are concentrated in the city, making it the company's top priority for expansion. Airtel is in the process of securing strategic land parcels in and around Mumbai, while leveraging its long-term cloud partnership with Google and capacity already under construction to achieve its target.
"Within the hyperscaler segment, a very large part of the workloads run off Mumbai, and therefore, one of the key considerations for getting to 1 GW is the right land parcels in Mumbai, which we’re in the process of finalising," he said. He also said that the upcoming build that is already underway and that will be a couple of 100 MW over next couple of years.
The Mumbai push builds on partnerships Airtel has stitched together over the past few years. In 2020, Carlyle invested $235 million in Nxtra Data, acquiring a 25% stake to accelerate the platform's expansion. Two years later, in 2022, Google committed to invest up to $1 billion in Airtel, including a $700 million equity investment and up to $300 million towards commercial agreements spanning cloud, enterprise offerings, and digital services. Airtel is now leveraging those partnerships as it scales its AI-ready infrastructure.
The strategy also marks a kind geographic refocusing for the Delhi-headquartered telecom operator, whose telecom leadership has traditionally been strongest across northern India. By building a larger footprint in Mumbai—the country's biggest cloud and enterprise data centre market—Airtel is positioning itself closer to global hyperscalers, AI workloads, and large enterprise customers.
Alongside Nxtra, Airtel is also scaling up Airtel Cloud, with higher investments in talent, capital, and sales to deepen its enterprise offerings.
Brokerages expect data centres to dominate Airtel's capital allocation over the next few years. Bank of America said radio network investments have largely moderated and identified data centres as the principal source of incremental capex, highlighting Airtel's efforts to acquire land around Mumbai. Motilal Oswal also said investment priorities have shifted towards transport backbone, fibre, and data centres, with management outlining a disciplined roadmap to expand capacity and market share.
Airtel's Mumbai-centric strategy comes as rivals ramp up investments across India's AI infrastructure landscape. Reliance Industries has announced a $110 billion investment plan, with a significant portion earmarked for AI infrastructure, including its flagship AI-ready data centre campus at Jamnagar.
The Adani Group has pledged $100 billion in investments by 2035, with AdaniConneX—its joint venture with EdgeConneX—expanding hyperscale data centres across Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, and Visakhapatnam, while also pushing into central India. TCS has deepened partnerships with global hyperscalers including Microsoft, Google Cloud, AWS, and NVIDIA to build enterprise AI and cloud capabilities, intensifying competition for India's rapidly growing data centre opportunity.