Mantra Data Centers Tuesday said it will design, build and operate data centers in Mumbai, NCR (Delhi), Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata with an investment of $1 billion and an initial IT load of 20MW.

"MDC is very well positioned for success in this growing market, with a strong management team, green sourced energy, 1st in-class stakeholders, on-time delivery, and the right locations to create a network of Tier III & IV Data Centres across India," commented Jaan M. Chainani, Co-Founder & Managing Director.

With a population of over 1.3 billion, India's digital growth has been fuelled by digitisation programmes by the government, internet penetration, increased adoption of cloud, IoT, growing use cases for Augmented / Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence and the roll out of 5G.

A report by Headwind Consultants highlighted that the global investment in the first half of 2021 has touched the $100 billion mark with India benefitting as the single largest market outside of the USA.

It is worth noting that the total addressable Indian Data Center market is estimated to surpass $8.5 billion by 2023 with an increasing share of third-party DCs (from ~45% in FY18 to ~62% in FY23).

Leading global firms including STTelemedia, EST, NTT, among others have already started investing in the data center space in India.