Digital Realty Opens Datacentre in Chennai
By Aaron Tan, ComputerWeekly.com
January 15, 2024
Digital Realty has launched its MAA10 datacentre in Chennai, in a bid to tap the growing opportunities in India’s fast-growing datacentre market.
Developed by Digital Connexion, a joint venture between Digital Realty, Brookfield Infrastructure and Indian telco Jio, the facility will offer 20MW of IT load on a datacentre campus capable of providing 100MW of capacity.
Reliance Industries, the parent company of Jio, had reportedly invested about Rs 378 crore (US$45.6m) into Digital Connexion, with Reliance, Brookfield and Digital Realty each owning an equal stake in the venture.
MAA10 features a modular infrastructure design, enabling customers to scale infrastructure as needed to accommodate diverse workload demands, from single-cabinet to multi-megawatt requirements.
The facility is ready to support emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), offering standardised and bespoke configurations to meet the high-density power requirements of up to 70 kilowatts per rack, suitable cooling infrastructure and interconnectivity demands of AI workloads.
Digital Realty said the Chennai datacentre, which will leverage Jio’s digital and connectivity infrastructure across India, is a vital addition to its global datacentre platform that hosts customers, partners, cloud and network service providers with a footprint of over 300 facilities in more than 25 countries.
Later this year, the datacentre will also let customers configure and provision connectivity on-demand across their digital infrastructure to fit their needs.
Serene Nah, managing director and head of Asia-Pacific at Digital Realty, said that with a population of 1.4 billion and a growing focus on the delivery of digital services, India represents a key market opportunity for Digital Realty, and its partners and customers.
“We believe MAA10’s next-generation datacentre infrastructure and Digital Realty’s connected global open datacentre platform will provide the foundational pillars our customers need to innovate and tap into this thriving market,” she added.
MAA10’s campus is located in Ambattur, a northwestern neighbourhood in Chennai that has the necessary power supply and a high number of submarine cable landing stations, according to CB Velayuthan, CEO of Digital Connexion.
