India didn’t win the AI infrastructure race by accident

From a distance, India’s position in the global build-out of AI infrastructure looks like good timing. It isn’t. The recently concluded BRICS summit in New Delhi put digital infrastructure and AI squarely on the grouping’s agenda, and the closer you look at how India got here, the clearer it becomes that the country has spent years deliberately assembling the power, water, and land advantages this moment now rewards.

Start with the mathematics of demand, because it explains why the advantage is so hard to copy. A conventional enterprise data hall was designed for 5 to 10 kW a rack. A GPU cluster running AI workloads wants 40 kW or more. That shift cascades into everything, heavier electrical systems, liquid cooling, entirely new sites rather than retrofits. Across Asia Pacific, our research shows data centre electricity use has nearly doubled since 2020 and could triple again within a few years, and the average new campus in the region has already crossed 100 MW. Scaling into that kind of demand takes years of preparation. It is an industrial strategy, not a line item in a budget.

Every market in the BRICS grouping is chasing this demand, but the comparison favours India. São Paulo, Latin America’s largest data centre market, has just under 540 MW and is still relying on new tax breaks to bring costs down. Saudi Arabia has grown its operational capacity almost sevenfold in five years, from 68 MW to 467 MW, an impressive pace but still a fraction of India’s scale. South Africa’s grid has only been stable for a little over a year, after a decade of rolling blackouts, and is only now starting to court the operators India has already attracted. Indonesia is picking up overflow deployments that Singapore has no room for.

India isn’t catching up in any of these comparisons. It crossed 1,700 MW of capacity at the end of 2025. It added a record 440 MW that year alone and is on track to pass 3 GW by 2028.

Investment tells the same story. Commitments already stand at $126 billion cumulative, after a record $56.4 billion last year alone, and could top $180 billion by the end of 2026. When we assessed the major Asia Pacific markets against power availability, construction costs, skilled labour supply and environmental risk, India was the only one to score favourably on every single measure.

Power is the clearest reason why. India crossed the halfway mark on non-fossil electricity capacity in June 2025, five years ahead of its own Paris Agreement commitment. It then added 55.3 GW of that capacity in the following financial year, nearly double the previous record of 29.5 GW and the fastest annual build-out the country has recorded. Hyperscalers, who already account for 50-55% of data centre activity in India, are increasingly building to their own specification because India lets them secure power before construction even starts. This year’s Union Budget added a tax holiday running to 2047 for foreign companies serving global customers from Indian data centres, a horizon few other markets can match, giving investors confidence to commit at scale. The next step is transmission, matching the speed of power commitments with the speed of grid connections, so India’s lead in generation converts fully into a lead in delivered capacity.

Water is where India’s foresight will matter the most. Data centres are a tiny fraction of the country’s overall water demand, but more than half its facilities sit in regions already classified as water-stressed, which is exactly why the smartest operators are moving early rather than waiting for scarcity to force the issue. Treated wastewater instead of fresh supply, cooling systems designed for far lower consumption, and site selection that weighs the nearest aquifer as carefully as the nearest substation, these are inexpensive choices now that would be costly retrofits later. States that set efficiency standards now, while most of India’s capacity is still being built, will be the ones still winning this argument a decade from now.

Serviced land is the final piece, and India’s map is already sorting itself in the country’s favour. Mumbai, anchored by subsea cable landings and the country’s most dependable grid, holds roughly half the capacity across India’s leading markets, and that share could reach 68% by 2030. Smaller facilities are already coming up in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Lucknow, bringing computing closer to users well ahead of most emerging markets’ edge infrastructure plans. States that can hand over plots already wired with power and clearances, not simply cheap land, will keep pulling further ahead.

This is also where India can lead rather than simply compete. The New Delhi Declaration, adopted on September 12, welcomed the BRICS Guiding Principles on Smart Grids and Energy Storage, along with India’s own initiative to establish the BRICS Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage, a natural extension of choices India made on power years before AI entered a single boardroom. Grid storage, transmission planning and cooling standards are challenges every member still faces, and India proposed a way to work through them before anyone asked it to. Holding onto this lead, and extending it, will take the same kind of foresight that built it in the first place.

(The author is chairman and CEO, India, South-East Asia, Middle East and Africa, CBRE. Views are personal.)