Yotta, one of India’s leading data centre companies, is working with NVIDIA to deploy Blackwell GPUs. Co-founder and CEO Sunil Gupta said that the company has ordered 8,000 GPUs, expected to go live by December–January. Given the global shortage and sky-high demand for Blackwell-family GPUs (NVIDIA’s post-Hopper architecture), this scale of procurement is significant.
During an exclusive interaction with AIM, when asked about OpenAI’s search for partners to set up a data centre in India, Gupta said Yotta is open to collaboration.
He emphasised that India’s push for digital sovereignty should not be mistaken for isolationism. “Sovereign for sure never means we as a country start looking inwards and close ourselves to the rest of the world,” he said.
Instead, government initiatives like Make in India are designed to attract investment and build local infrastructure, while keeping global players engaged.
India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023), along with draft operational rules and sectoral localisation mandates, will force or strongly incentivise many firms to keep data and compute local. This is expected to create predictable demand for domestic AI infrastructure.
If OpenAI were to invest directly in India, Gupta said it could drive economic development, job creation, lower latency, and a better user experience for Indian users.
Typical round-trip latency from India to US cloud regions is 200–350 ms, depending on telecom providers and exact destinations. By comparison, local cloud hosting in India typically delivers 20–50 ms latency. This means hosting inference or cloud services domestically can cut round-trip times by roughly 150–250 ms versus US-based hosting.
India’s data centre market itself is in a period of explosive growth. According to the Economic Survey 2024–25, the industry is expected to expand from $4.5 billion in 2023 to $11.6 billion by 2032. A JLL report further estimates that overall capacity will surge by 77% by 2027, reaching 1.8 GW.
To put this into perspective, the global data centre market was valued at $347.60 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $652.01 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 11.2% between 2025 and 2030.
Mumbai dominates the sector, accounting for 45–50% of India’s data centre market. The city’s stability of power supply, private distribution, and position as the country’s financial hub make it the preferred choice for hyperscalers. Cushman & Wakefield ranks Mumbai sixth globally for under-construction data centre capacity, ahead of London and Dublin.
Chennai follows with about 21% of capacity, thanks to subsea cable connectivity with Singapore. Hyderabad, despite being landlocked, has emerged due to aggressive state incentives. Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, and Pune make up the rest, though at a smaller scale.
Why Mumbai stands out
Gupta noted that Mumbai’s early lead came from the availability of three separate operator facilities that could form a resilient “triangle” of availability zones. While historical details explain the city’s legacy role, Mumbai continues to outpace rivals due to its connectivity, infrastructure, and sheer market demand.
Along with Yotta Data Services, OpenAI is in preliminary discussions with other data centre providers, including Sify Technologies, E2E Networks, and CtrlS Datacenters.
Expanding data centres into smaller Indian cities faces a major hurdle: fibre availability. Gupta explained that while land and power are available in cities like Indore, Bhubaneswar, or Lucknow, redundancy in fibre networks is lacking. “Even after multiple cuts, your data centre cannot afford to be cut off,” he said.
For large-scale projects, location is critical not just for connectivity but also cost and sustainability. Gupta added that cheaper and greener energy will be key, and argued that the government will need to take the lead in developing large, planned clusters.
As India races towards an $11.6 billion valuation for its data centre market, partnerships like Yotta–NVIDIA and potential collaborations with OpenAI could redefine the digital infrastructure in the country. Whether Stargate lands in Mumbai, or another hub, will depend on how India balances sovereignty, scalability and sustainability.
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