India building world’s second-largest data centre capacity, says man who has built 20% of it
India is currently building the second-largest number of data centres in the world after the United States, and one Mumbai-based company claims it has already commissioned or built approximately 20 percent of that total capacity since 2019, according to Varun Maniar, Managing Director of Electromech InfraProjects, which constructs electrical, mechanical, cooling, and fire safety systems for data centres across the country.
Maniar, who returned to India from careers in financial services in the US and the UK in 2013, started Electromech, building small data centres for multinational corporations within large office buildings. The large-scale opportunity came in 2019, when Microsoft, Amazon, and other global cloud players began investing seriously in Indian cloud infrastructure. Since then, the company has grown to become what Maniar describes as a top-three contractor in the space, working with all five of the largest data centre developers in India, whose names he cannot disclose due to non-disclosure agreements.
The business of building data centres, he explains, is not the same as owning them. The land and power belong to the data centre operator, who then contracts out the technical construction of electrical systems, cooling systems, mechanical systems, and IT infrastructure to companies like Electromech.
The racks inside the data centre, where the actual data is stored, belong to the end customer, whether that is Amazon, Netflix, a bank, or a government institution.
On the question of data centres consuming enormous amounts of water, a concern that has been widely reported in the context of AI infrastructure growth, Maniar is pointed. “That is true in America. It is not true in India,” he says. Indian data centres use air-cooled chiller technology rather than the water-cooled tower systems used in older American facilities.
New AI data centres additionally use liquid cooling with chemical coolants rather than water. He describes much of the public concern as fear-mongering unsupported by actual consumption figures for Indian facilities.
“Nobody’s saying that in one data centre in India, how much water is needed. People are just saying it needs a lot of water, a lot of water.”
On the broader challenge of scaling up, Maniar is candid. The bottleneck is not land or power for his company.
It is people. Building two to three times the current capacity requires the right teams, project managers, supply chains, technicians, and partners, all at significantly greater scale.
His company is responding partly through acquisitions of smaller firms to build commissioning and factory fabrication capabilities in-house.
