Brookfield Infrastructure has entered into an agreement with K Raheja Corp to acquire the developer’s nearly 30-acre land parcel in Navi Mumbai’s Airoli locality for around Rs 550 crore, said persons with direct knowledge of the development.
Brookfield Infrastructure is planning to develop, own and operate an institutional data center on the said land parcel.
K Raheja Corp had bought this land parcel in Navi Mumbai for around Rs 200 crore from the US-based specialty chemicals company Cabot Corporation in December 2015.
Last month, Brookfield Infrastructure and NYSE-listed Digital Realty entered into a 50:50 alliance to jointly invest over $2 billion to develop, own and operate institutional data centers across India. The joint venture will operate under the brand name BAM Digital Realty.
It could not be ascertained if the data center on this land parcel will be developed by the Brookfield-Digital Realty joint venture or will be developed independently by Brookfield and put under this alliance’s portfolio later.
The joint venture will expand Brookfield Infrastructure’s global data infrastructure portfolio, which currently includes $23 billion assets across data transmission, distribution, and storage. This also includes a portfolio of 139,000 operational telecom wireless towers in India, which it intends to expand to 175,000 over the near term.
Both Brookfield Asset Management and K Raheja Corp declined to comment for the story.
Brookfield has over a decade of experience investing in India, with around $20 billion of assets under management including infrastructure, renewable power, real estate, and private equity.
Data centers in India are emerging as the most attractive growth opportunity for global institutional investors and leading developers. Investments are flowing into the data centre markets, with multiple new markets created simultaneously, along with the rapid development of campus sizes found in the most established global cities.
So far, a total $13.5 billion investment has been planned and committed for data centers development in the country and global firms’ contribution out of this is more than 70%, showed data from Cushman & Wakefield.
The investment and commitments clearly indicate the rising preference for India among global data centre majors and is attributed to the data localisation norms and the government’s proposed new data centre policy aimed at simplifying the rules. The new data centre policy is also expected to provide necessary clearances and infrastructure in a time bound manner.
India is a high-growth market, with data center demand expected to significantly increase, driven by rapidly growing data consumption, digitization of the economy, the onset of 5G and data localization trends.
