New Delhi, March 13 (IANS). India’s data center industry is growing rapidly, the government told Parliament on Friday. The country’s total data center capacity was about 375 MW in 2020, which is expected to increase four times to about 1,500 MW by 2025.
Union Minister Jitin Prasad gave this information in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha. He informed that approximately 38,231 GPUs have been made available through 14 registered service providers and data centers under the AI Compute Capacity Framework to promote the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
He said these computing resources are being made available to startups, researchers, educational institutions and other eligible users at an average subsidized rate of Rs 65 per hour, which is about one-third of the global average cost.
Data centers have been set up in major technology hubs of the country such as Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Noida and Jamnagar.
The minister said the government is fully aware of the growing needs of the data center ecosystem, such as demand for power and water.
According to the Energy Ministry, power demand from data centers may increase to about 13.56 GW by 2031-32 as the sector expands rapidly with AI and large-scale computing services.
He said that the country’s national transmission infrastructure is being continuously expanded to meet the growing power demand and ensure reliable power supply in all regions.
The recently enacted Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Act will also help in providing reliable power for emerging sectors like AI and data centers by enabling the use of small modular and micro nuclear reactors in the future.
The minister said that water consumption in a data center depends on the cooling technology used.
He said the use of groundwater for industrial uses like data centers is regulated under the guidelines of the Jal Shakti Ministry.
To reduce water consumption, the industry is now using modern technologies like direct-to-chip liquid cooling, adiabatic cooling and immersion cooling.
Apart from this, companies are also installing high-density rack systems so that high-performance computing and AI workloads can be handled better and power and water consumption can also be reduced.
–IANS
DBP
