Bharti Airtel plans a major expansion of its Nxtra data centre arm to meet rising demand, aiming for a 1GW capacity through strategic investments and fibre infrastructure growth across India’s top cities.
Bharti Airtel is preparing a major expansion of its data centre arm, Nxtra, with a long-term target of 1 gigawatt of capacity, a scale-up that would mark a sharp rise from the roughly 120MW to 130MW it currently operates, according to Telecom Talk. The company has said the extra capacity is needed to meet rising demand from cloud providers and enterprise customers and has signalled that it will direct capital expenditure towards businesses where it sees room for faster competitive growth.
That ambition has already been backed by fresh money. In March, Airtel announced a $1 billion investment in Nxtra from Alpha Wave Global, Carlyle and Anchorage Capital, with Airtel also contributing and retaining control of the business. The company said at the time that the funding would help Nxtra expand from about 300MW to 1GW over the coming years, while serving enterprises, hyperscalers and government clients. Airtel has also said Nxtra operates 14 large core data centres and more than 120 edge facilities across India, spanning co-location, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery and edge computing.
The latest plans also fit a wider push by Airtel into fibre infrastructure. Telecom Talk reported that the group is expanding its fibre network across India’s top 400 cities and is prioritising fibre additions in its homes business, while scaling back some fixed wireless access rollouts in newer areas because of higher churn and weaker economics. Airtel has also pointed to rising memory and chip prices as a drag on that segment. The move towards fibre and larger data centre capacity reflects a broader bet that India’s digital economy will keep demanding more reliable connectivity and more local infrastructure, especially as cloud and artificial intelligence workloads grow.
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