India’s digital ambitions are soaring sky-high, and data centers are the rocket fuel powering this digital revolution. As the platform on which India’s digital infrastructure is being built, they are pivotal to India’s growth journey. In this exclusive conversation with Sudhir Kunder, Chief Business Officer of DE-CIX India, we explore how data centers are powering a new wave of growth.
How is interconnection transforming the efficiency and sustainability of data centres in India, especially as demand for AI and cloud services grows?
As of the end of 2024, the power load of India’s data center industry reached 1,369 megawatts (MW), marking a sharp increase from previous years, with Mumbai alone hosting the majority share (source: Statista, May 2025). This growth aligns with India’s projected surge in capacity to 4,500 MW by 2030 and further ambitions of reaching 17 GW, which could consume up to 8% of the nation’s total electricity (source: Data Center Dynamics, 2024).
Currently, data centers in India are among the fastest-growing energy consumers, driven by the explosion of cloud services, AI, and edge workloads. As per IEA and Deloitte, generative AI is accelerating this trend, with electricity demand per rack increasing due to high-density GPU workloads. In this context, interconnection platforms like DE-CIX India can enable reduce energy consumption by 15–40% annually through localized routing, reduced transit layers, and optimised traffic paths.
Applying this efficiency to the current 1,369 MW power load, the net savings could amount to 205–548 MW, translating to an annual energy reduction of up to 4.8–12.8 TWh, while also avoiding approximately 3.6–9.6 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions, based on India’s average grid emission factor of 0.75 kg CO₂/kWh (CEA, 2023). This cements interconnection’s role as a strategic lever for enabling a greener, more scalable digital infrastructure in India.
As India accelerates its digital transformation, what role do Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) play in supporting the country’s expanding data economy?
With over 900 million internet users and growing demand for cloud, AI, and real-time services, IXPs ensure that 40–60% of internet traffic stays local. This localisation significantly cuts bandwidth costs — from $30–40 per Mbps internationally to just $2–5 regionally — while improving latency to under 20 milliseconds.DE-CIX India has also recorded exponential data traffic growth across key digital sectors: Gaming (+2054%), OTT (+1964%), Social Media (+1096%), and ISPs (+929%). This surge directly reflects India’s evolving digital consumption habits and underlines IXPs as the backbone of this transformation.
Moreover, by fostering robust interconnection, IXPs support the rapid expansion of data centers — India’s capacity is set to double from 1 GW in 2023 to 2 GW by 2026. Altogether, IXPs form the invisible infrastructure fueling India’s ambition to become a $1 trillion digital economy by 2030.
With the rise of real-time applications, what infrastructure priorities must be addressed to ensure low-latency, high-performance connectivity across the country?
With the explosion of real-time applications across India, from UPI and cloud gaming to video conferencing and AI inference, the backbone must deliver <20 ms latency and high network reliability. DE-CIX India is already enabling this shift — handling 1.44 Tbps peak traffic, connecting 600+ networks across 60+ data centers, and having exchanged over 39 exabytes of data.
To meet growing demands, infrastructure priorities include:
- Scaling IXPs to more cities to avoid routing traffic across long distances.
- Edge deployment to cut latency by 30%, especially critical as DC capacity grows from 1,369 MW (2024) to 4,500 MW by 2030.
- Fiber densification beyond the current 1.5 million route km to support load balancing and ensure last-mile efficiency.
- Peering with cloud directly, which through DE-CIX’s DirectCLOUD brings 25–30% latency gains and avoids unnecessary transit hops.
How do you see the ecosystem of interconnection, edge computing, and scalable networks evolving to support India’s ambitions of becoming a global digital hub?
India’s ambition to become a global digital hub is materializing through a powerful blend of interconnection, edge computing, and robust network infrastructure. Platforms like DE-CIX India—handling 1.44 Tbps peak traffic and connecting 600+ networks across 60+ data centers—are central to this shift, enabling low-latency local data exchange critical for real-time services like AI and immersive tech.
As data center capacity is set to grow from 1,369 MW in 2024 to over 4,500 MW by 2030, edge computing becomes essential, bringing compute closer to users, improving latency by up to 30%, and supporting smart industries. Government policies like the National Broadband Mission and India Data Center Policy, along with public-private partnerships, are fueling this growth, with ₹3 lakh crore in digital infrastructure investment expected by 2026. This evolution isn’t just technological—it’s strategic, establishing digital sovereignty and positioning India as a resilient, scalable digital infrastructure powerhouse for both domestic and global markets.
