India's Reliance Industries said it would invest up to US$122.24 million (S$162 million) in building data centres in the country along with Canada-based Brookfield Infrastructure.
Reliance will initially invest about US$46 million in Mercury Holdings SG Pte, a joint venture (JV) between Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty.
In a separate filing, RIL said it has partnered with Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty in their Indian special purpose vehicles (SPVs) set up for developing data centres in India.
Reliance will hold a 33.33 percent stake in each of the Indian SPVs and become an equal partner, adding that the venture will be branded as Digital Connexion. The company has committed to invest the remaining in equity and debt securities of the JV’s units when needed.
Each partner will own one-third of the joint venture post transactions, which is awaiting regulatory approvals and is expected to complete in three months.
Digital Connexion will initially execute the development of data centre campuses in Chennai and Mumbai.
The JV’s first 20 megawatts greenfield data centre (MAA10), on a 100 MW campus in Chennai, is expected to be completed by the end of 2023.
The JV also recently announced the acquisition of 2.15 acres of land in Mumbai, to build a 40 MW data centre.
Data centres developed in India by the JV will leverage Digital Realty's industry-data centre platform, design and operating procedures, highly-repeatable Pervasive Data Centre Architecture approach and relationships with global customers.
Plug and play
Reliance Jio Platforms's CEO, Kiran Thomas, said the partnership will help them serve enterprise and SMB (small and medium-sized business) clients with plug-and-play solutions delivered from the cloud and lead their digital transformation.
"The unique and highly engaging consumer and home experiences that we are offering and further innovating on, such as high-definition live content, AR / VR experiences, cloud gaming, immersive shopping experiences and cloud PC have massive compute capacity requirements," he added.
The JV will serve global and local enterprises, SMBs and startups of India, for their cloud and colocation requirements as they move their compute resources on the cloud and off-premise.
The statement mentioned that the data centre capacity in India is expected to increase multi-fold as consumers in the country are already amongst the largest mobile data consumers globally.
India's Adani Enterprises joint venture had already raised US$213 million to fund under-construction data centres.
