Billionaire Sunil Mittal’s Airtel, Partners To Invest $1 Billion In Indian Data Center Projects

Fiber Optical cables connected to ethernet ports.

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Bharti Airtel—controlled by billionaire Sunil Mittal—and a group of investors are investing $1 billion in data center projects in India to tap into the AI boom in the world’s most populous country.

Under the deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals, three U.S. private equity firms will inject fresh capital into Airtel’s data center unit, Nxtra Data. Alpha Wave Global will invest $435 million, Carlyle will contribute $240 million, and Anchorage Capital will add $35 million. The remaining investment will come from Airtel, which will keep a controlling stake in Nxtra, according to a statement released on Monday.

“Strategic partnerships with global investors and technology leaders are central to our growth roadmap, enabling us to accelerate expansion, harness world-class expertise, and deliver next generation digital infrastructure solutions at scale,” Gopal Vittal, executive vice chairman of Airtel said in the statement.

Nxtra currently operates 14 data centers across India with a total capacity of about 300 megawatts. The company is building new facilities across Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata, aiming to expand its capacity to 1 gigawatt in the next few years.

In partnership with Google, Nxtra is also developing a gigawatt-scale data center in Visakhapatnam, a port city on India’s east coast, backed by a $15 billion investment announced last October.

India is one of the region’s hottest data center markets, with Mumbai’s capacity increasing 42% to 768 megawatts last year, Chicago-based real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield said in a report last week.

The country’s billionaires are tapping into the AI-driven boom in data centers. Reliance Industries—controlled by Asia’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani—and his fellow billionaire Gautam Adani’s Adani Enterprises are separately spending $100 billion each to build data centers and other digital infrastructure facilities in the next few years across India.

Bharti Airtel, which has over 600 million mobile customers across South Asia and Africa, has also been scaling its data center footprint. Mittal, who has a real-time net worth of $13 billion, is the controlling shareholder of Bharti Airtel. He also holds a stake in Airtel Payments Bank, a joint venture with Kotak Mahindra Bank, which is controlled by fellow billionaire Uday Kotak.