A photo of Bharti Airtel’s office building in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi.
Pacific Press | Light Rocket | Getty Images
Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel has raised $1 billion from private equity firm Alpha Wave for its data center division, Nxtra Data. carlyle and Anchorage Capital highlight the growing global interest in this sector.
Bharti Airtel is India’s second-largest telecom operator and the latest raise will value Nxtra Data at approximately $3.1 billion after the transaction closes, the company said in a stock exchange filing on Monday.
Nxtra Data will receive $435 million from Florida-based Alpha Wave Global, $240 million from existing investors Carlyle, based in Washington, and $35 million from New York City-based Anchorage Capital, Airtel said, adding that it will contribute the remaining amount.
Airtel said the fresh funding will support Nxtra’s expansion across India.
Airtel executive vice president Gopal Vittal said Nxtra is building a “data center network” aimed at meeting the evolving needs of enterprise, hyperscaler and government customers.
Nxtra has around 300MW of data center capacity and “will expand to 1GW in the next few years, aiming for ~25% market share,” he added. We currently have 14 large data centers and more than 120 smaller, distributed facilities near end users and devices.
data center boom
Demand for data centers around the world has skyrocketed in recent years, largely due to the explosion of AI workloads, which require vast amounts of computing power, power, cooling, and network infrastructure. In 2025, more than $61 billion will flow into the data center market.
“There is tremendous AI opportunity in India. Indians are already making meaningful use of platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools,” Navroz D. Udwadia, co-founder of Alpha Wave Global, said in a filing. He added that India’s data center capacity needs to expand significantly to keep up with demand from hyperscalers and large-scale language models.
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With increasing artificial intelligence workloads, global interest in India’s data center sector is rapidly increasing. In December, microsoft and Amazon has committed over $50 billion to India’s cloud and AI infrastructure in less than 24 hours. In October, google announced a $15 billion investment to build India’s largest data center hub outside the United States.
To maintain this momentum, the Indian government earlier this year announced a 20-year tax holiday for hyperscalers that utilize data centers in the country to serve customers around the world.
India, with its already low infrastructure costs and newly announced tax incentives, is becoming increasingly attractive to hyperscalers compared to rival hubs such as Singapore, the UAE and Ireland.
“We have a strong partnership with Airtel and continue to believe that Nxtra is well-positioned to benefit from India’s long-term digital infrastructure tailwinds,” Kapil Modi, partner at Carlyle India Advisors, said in a filing.
According to a December report by KPMG, the total capacity of data centers installed in India is expected to exceed 2GW by 2026, up from just over 1GW in 2025. The company projects that production capacity will increase five-fold to more than 8GW by 2030, incurring an estimated $30 billion in capital investment.
Another Indian data center company, Yotta Data Services, has invested $2 billion to Nvidia-The AI hub, which is powered by Google, told CNBC’s “Inside India” earlier this year that it plans to list on the public markets by the end of 2026 or early 2027 to raise funds for expansion.
