September 22, 2025
NEW DELHI – Mumbai has reinforced its position as India’s data centre capital, accounting for 40 percent of the country’s total capacity and 44 percent of live IT capacity, according to Knight Frank’s Asia-Pacific Data Centres 2025 report.
In the first half of 2025, Mumbai’s capacity jumped 14.3percent, surpassing the 4GW milestone with 591MW operational, 185MW under construction, and 3.2GW in the pipeline, according to a report from real estate services firm Knight Frank.
The city recorded a robust 97.6MW of take-up during the period, keeping its vacancy rate tight at 5.4%, well below India’s overall colocation vacancy rate of 12.3%.
Strong cloud adoption, data localisation rules, and the growth of fintech and BFSI sectors are driving demand. Two-thirds of under-construction capacity is already pre-leased, but supply for hyperscale deployments remains tight.
Only three live sites can support deployments above 2.5MW, and just one offers more than 10MW.
To bridge this gap, global players are making large-scale bets. NTT’s proposed 500MW NAV2 campus and Blackstone-Panchshil Realty’s 500MW AI facility are among the large-scale investments entering the market.
Meanwhile, Hyderabad is emerging as an alternative hyperscale hub, with 500MW of new capacity planned, including NTT’s INR 10,500 crore AI campus and STT GDC India’s 100MW project, the report highlighted.
Shishir Baijal, Chairman and Managing Director, Knight Frank India, said, “With over 3GW of capacity in the pipeline and strong policy support for green data centre parks, Mumbai is attracting sustained global investment.”
“As cloud adoption and AI workloads accelerate, Mumbai’s unique strengths, its robust subsea cable connectivity, scalable power infrastructure, proximity to enterprise hubs, and progressive state policies are consolidating its position as India’s data centre capital.”
While other metros like Chennai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru are gaining traction, none match Mumbai’s scale, speed, and ability to serve as South Asia’s gateway for cloud, AI, and enterprise workloads, he noted.
Across APAC, data centre growth is booming, with 13GW of new projects announced in H1 2025, more than doubling the previous year’s figure. Global hyperscalers including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta have committed over US$160 billion in capital expenditure this year alone, underscoring the region’s strategic importance.