Equinix, a US-headquartered data centre company, has announced an initial investment of $86 million to build a new data centre in Mumbai. The firm has acquired a four-acre land parcel in the city's Chandivali area.

The new data centre, to be named MB3, will be Equinix’s third such facility in Mumbai. MB3 IBX will be adjacent to Equinix MB2 IBX and 1.5 km away from MB1 IBX data centre.

The first phase of MB3 is scheduled to open in Q2 2024, providing an initial capacity of more than 1,375 cabinets, and more than 4,150 cabinets when fully built out.

Mumbai is the country’s top data centre market and is expected to grow over 2.5 times to nearly 530 megawatts (MW) by 2023 as per a recent report by JLL. As the business capital of India, Mumbai hosts a dozen sub-sea cable landing points and the most cloud regions of global major cloud service providers.

In March this year, Equinix expanded into Chennai with a land acquisition of over 5.5 acres.

“Equinix’s continued investment in Mumbai will further enhance its network-dense and interconnection-rich data centre platform in India, meeting the significant demand from global and local customers. This expansion will support Indian organizations in enhancing their digital transformation strategies and enable global companies across sectors to expand their operations in India.

“The increasing digitalization of economy is continuously driving the demand for data centre and interconnection services in India. Particularly in Mumbai, the high demand for our digital infrastructure services among Indian and international customers is making us very optimistic about the market," Manoj Paul, Managing Director, Equinix India said.

“We are focused on further investments in building the infrastructure in India to enable our existing and new customers in India to launch their services closer to their consumers," he said adding that the investment will also be supporting the government’s vision to make India a key data centre hub in South East Asia.

Globally, Equinix operates more than 240 data centres across 70 metros, providing digital infrastructure for more than 10,000 of the world’s leading businesses. In Asia-Pacific, Equinix has 52 data centres in key metros across Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea and Singapore.

According to a report by ratings agency CRISIL, data centre capacity in India is expected to double to about 1,700-1,800 megawatt (MW) by fiscal 2025 from 870 MW in fiscal 2022, powered by the combination of data boom, digital adoption and local data storage mandates. Nitesh Jain, Director, CRISIL Ratings, said data centres are emerging as an attractive infrastructure asset class in India. He added that the industry is expected to add almost 850-900 MW capacity during fiscals 2023-25.