Data Centre Stocks in India: Who Gets Paid When a Data Centre Is Built
India's data centres are being built with Indian generators, cables and chillers, and filled with imported chips. Here is who gets paid for each part, which of those companies you can buy, and what could go wrong.
Figures checked · How we calculate
₹60 croreto build one megawatt of data centre in India
That is before a single server goes in. India added 440 MW of data centre capacity in 2025 and is expected to add about 500 MW in 2026, according to CBRE. At ₹50–70 crore a megawatt, 500 MW is ₹25,000–35,000 crore of construction in a single year. About 40–45% of it goes on electrical equipment and 15–25% on cooling. Those are the orders Indian listed companies compete for. The servers and chips inside cost more than the building, and almost all of them are imported.
A data centre is a building that turns electricity into computing, and the computing into heat. India had about 1.6 GW of it running in mid-2026, measured by the power the servers can draw, against roughly 375 MW in 2020. Mumbai holds more than half of it, because that is where most of the undersea internet cables come ashore.
A data centre has eight parts, and a different set of companies supplies each
Pick a part of the building to see what it does, what share of the build cost it takes, and which listed Indian companies are paid for it. Direct means data centres are a stated core business or a disclosed, large share of revenue. Indirect means data centres are one customer among many.
Inside a data centre · who supplies each part
3 Switchgear, UPS, batteries and cables
Inside the building, power is split, cleaned and backed up. A UPS and its batteries carry the load for the seconds it takes the generators to start. Everything is duplicated, which is why electrical kit is the biggest slice of the build cost.
Share of build cost 40–45% of build cost, electrical systems as a whole
- IndirectSchneider Electric InfrastructureSwitchgear and distribution transformers.
- IndirectABB IndiaSwitchgear, busbars and electrification products.
- IndirectPolycab, KEI IndustriesPower and control cables. Both name data centres among the sources of their order growth.
- IndirectAmara Raja, ExideIndustrial batteries of the kind used in UPS systems.
Two patterns stand out. The suppliers are paid first: Cummins and Blue Star book revenue when the equipment is delivered, whether or not the finished hall ever fills up. The operators are paid last. They carry the land, the debt and the empty-hall risk for years before the rent arrives. And the most expensive layer, the chips, has the fewest Indian listed companies in it.
Capacity has quadrupled since 2020, and the 2030 forecasts disagree by 50%
| Operating capacity | Source | |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | about 375 MW | Government of India |
| Mid-2026 | about 1.6 GW | JLL |
| 2029 | 6 GW forecast | JLL |
| 2030 | 8 GW forecast | Government of India |
| 2030 | 12 GW forecast | Wood Mackenzie |
The forecasts are 8 GW and 12 GW for the same year. That gap is 4 GW, about ₹2.4 lakh crore of construction at ₹60 crore a megawatt, and nobody knows which end is right. Treat any single forecast in an article or a broker note as one guess among several, including the ones in this table.
Demand is running ahead of supply for now. In January–June 2026, tenants took up 101 MW while 85 MW was delivered, and 82% of that take-up was pre-booked by the large cloud companies, according to JLL.
Four things are driving the build-out
Global cloud companies have committed more than $50 billion
- Google is building its largest AI hub outside the US in Visakhapatnam: $15 billion from 2026 to 2030, with Airtel as partner and AdaniConneX building the data centre. Construction started in April 2026.
- Meta signed in June 2026 for a 168 MW AI data centre that Reliance will build and run at Jamnagar, Meta's first in India.
- TCS plans a 1 GW campus in Hyderabad through its HyperVault venture, with up to ₹70,000 crore to be invested by it and its partners. TPG is putting in up to ₹8,820 crore.
The law increasingly keeps Indian data in India
RBI has required payment data to be stored only in India since 2018. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act's rules take full effect on 13 May 2027, with penalties of up to ₹250 crore per breach. Neither law forces every byte into an Indian building. Both push banks, insurers and large platforms towards local storage they can demonstrate to a regulator.
The Budget made India a tax-free base for serving the world
The Union Budget for 2026-27 exempts foreign cloud companies from Indian tax on income from global customers served out of Indian data centres, until 2047. Indian customers must still be billed through an Indian reseller, so domestic revenue stays taxable. The Budget also set a 15% cost-plus safe harbour for Indian companies that run captive data centres for a foreign parent.
India builds for a fraction of the global cost
Industry cost estimates put an AI-ready facility in India at ₹70–95 crore a megawatt, against about ₹200 crore for comparable facilities abroad. Cheap construction and cheap renewable power are what the tax holiday is meant to sell.
The government is also subsidising demand directly. The IndiaAI Mission (₹10,372 crore) has onboarded more than 38,000 GPUs that startups and researchers can rent at about ₹65 an hour. Its target is 100,000 by December 2026.
Five risks, each of which has already cost someone money somewhere
Revenue grows before profit does
E2E Networks rents out GPUs by the hour. Its FY26 revenue rose 50% to ₹246 crore, and it reported a loss of ₹156 crore, because the chips that produce the revenue lose value every year from the day they are bought. Nvidia now releases a new generation of AI chips every year. A building lasts decades. A company whose assets are mostly chips has to earn its money back fast, and a price war among GPU renters would stop it.
Power, not land, is the bottleneck
A 100 MW campus running all year uses 876 million units of electricity, what about 6 lakh Indians use at the national average. The government expects data centres to need 17 GW by 2031-32, and estimates put them at about 3% of India's electricity by 2030, up from under 1%. A grid connection can take longer than the building. In Chennai and Bengaluru, water for cooling is a second constraint.
A few customers decide the demand
When 82% of the space taken is pre-booked by a handful of cloud companies, the market depends on those companies' spending plans. They set those plans in the US, quarter by quarter. If they cut capital spending, Indian orders for generators, chillers and halls slow within months, and the stocks that depend on them re-price faster.
Announced capacity is not built capacity
Announcements in this sector are measured in gigawatts, and completions in megawatts. Anant Raj had 28 MW running at the end of FY26 against a stated target of more than 300 MW by FY32. AdaniConneX has 55 MW running and more than 560 MW contracted. Each figure is real. The distance between them is the execution risk you take on when you pay today's price for tomorrow's capacity.
The price already assumes the boom
A theme everyone can see is priced in. A stock at 70 times earnings has to grow its profit about 19% a year for ten years just to double, if its multiple settles at 25 by the end. Drone stocks in India has the full table, and the PE ratio guide shows how to work out what a multiple assumes. Do that before buying anything with "data centre" in the story.
What to watch over the next twelve months
- Every quarter: Cummins India's data centre share of domestic power-generation sales, 30–35% in FY26 and about 40% in April–June 2026. Blue Star's data centre orders. Handovers at Anant Raj, Techno Electric and AdaniConneX, measured in MW actually delivered.
- The first pure-play listings: Sify Infinit Spaces has SEBI approval for a ₹3,700 crore IPO but had not announced dates by September 2026. Yotta, which has one of India's largest clusters of Nvidia chips, is reported to be preparing a ₹6,000–8,000 crore issue. They would be the first operators Indian investors can buy directly.
- Anant Raj's demerger: the board approved moving the data centre business into Ashok Cloud on 21 July 2026, one new share for each Anant Raj share. Listing is expected 18–24 months after approval.
- H2 2026: Reliance's first 120 MW at Jamnagar and the IndiaAI Mission's 100,000-GPU target, both due by year-end.
- 1 February 2027: the Union Budget, and any change to the cloud tax holiday.
- 13 May 2027: full DPDP compliance deadline.
- Every US earnings season: capital spending guidance from Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta. For Indian data centre suppliers, this is the number that matters most, and it is set outside India.
An index fund already gives you 17% of the theme's biggest names
On 31 August 2026, Reliance was 7.83% of the Nifty 50, Bharti Airtel 5.00% and Larsen & Toubro 4.30%. Together that is 17.13%. Put ₹1 lakh into a Nifty 50 index fund and ₹17,130 goes into the three largest listed groups building India's data centres, at an expense ratio of about 0.2% a year.
Data centres are a small part of each of those companies, so this is not a bet on the theme. It is exposure to it without the bet, and that is enough for most people. When a data centre company grows large enough, it joins the index and you own it automatically, at a price someone else took the risk to discover.
If you want more than that, there are two routes:
- A technology or digital fund. Several funds track the Nifty India Digital index or invest in technology broadly. Read the holdings first: most of the money is usually in software and internet companies, not the power and cooling suppliers in the diagram above. Buy the direct plan.
- Individual stocks. Run three checks on each. What share of revenue actually comes from data centres, from segment reporting rather than the press release? How large is the order book against the market value? Does profit turn into cash? The cash flow guide shows how to check the third.
Either way, the size of the position does more work than the choice of stock. Theme baskets can fall 60% and take years to recover.
- 5% of the portfolio in the theme₹30,0003% of the portfolio gone. Annoying, survivable.
- 20% in the theme₹1.2 L12% of the portfolio gone, about a year of a ₹10,000 SIP.
- 40% in the theme₹2.4 L24% of the portfolio gone. Most people sell at the bottom here.
The loss on the theme holding alone, assuming the rest of the portfolio is flat. Individual thematic stocks in India have fallen this far in past corrections; this is a scenario, not a forecast.
Frequently asked questions
Which is the best data centre stock in India? This site does not recommend individual stocks. The companies in the diagram are named to show where the money in a data centre goes, not as a buy list. Run the three checks above against each company's latest filings.
Is there a data centre mutual fund or ETF in India? We found no Indian fund that tracks a data centre index as of September 2026. Technology and digital funds hold some operators and suppliers. Data centre ETFs listed in the US exist, and buying them from India goes through the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, with foreign-asset tax rules.
Is Sify a data centre stock? Sify Technologies is listed on Nasdaq in the US, not in India. Its data centre arm, Sify Infinit Spaces, had 188 MW of built capacity in June 2025 and plans an Indian IPO.
Will AI demand keep growing? Nobody knows. Contracts signed today are real and run for 10 to 15 years, which protects operators that have already let their halls. Suppliers depend on the next round of orders, and those depend on AI spending plans that can change in one quarter.
How current is this page? Figures were checked on the date at the top. Company figures go stale with every quarterly result, so check the latest filings before acting on any of them.