Data centres & AI infrastructure.

India's data centres held ~1.5 GW of IT load in FY26 and generated an estimated ₹0.3 lakh crore of value added, just 0.1% of national GVA, because the industry sells conditioned space, power and connectivity rather than the computing done inside, whose value mostly belongs to foreign cloud providers and tenants. Capacity has compounded at ~22% a year since FY15 (data localisation rules, then hyperscaler cloud-region build-outs, then the AI cycle since FY24), and the base case takes capacity to 5 GW by FY30 and ~11 GW by FY35, with GVA rising to ₹1.0 lakh crore and ₹2.2 lakh crore. It is a capital-intensive, capex-heavy real-estate-and-utility business (₹60-70 crore of capex per MW, ~8-10% EBITDA yield) constrained by firm power connections and metro land, dominated by foreign operators and infrastructure capital, with essentially no direct listed exposure in India. Announced commitments from Reliance, Adani, Google, Microsoft and AWS exceed US$50 billion, but the chapter stresses that announcements are not capacity and the base case assumes only about half of the FY30 pipeline is actually operational by then.

Estimated GVA

0.3 ₹ lakh crore · FY26

Share of national GVA

0.10 % · FY26

Operational IT load / capacity

~1.5 GW · FY26

Grid draw

~2.2 GW · FY26

Share of national electricity (grid draw)

~1 % · FY26

Colocation revenue

~0.13 ₹ lakh crore · FY26

Power pass-through (additional)

~0.08 ₹ lakh crore · FY26

Capex

~0.35 ₹ lakh crore · FY26