Adani Bets Over ₹85378 Crore on AI Future in Massive Data Centre Push in India

Gautam Adani appears to be planning to infuse as much as $10 billion, about ₹85,378 crore, to set up data centres across India. The investment would go into building 1-gigawatt data centres initially, but help Adani Group scale them up to 10GW in the future.

Bloomberg has reported Adani’s upcoming data centres are aimed at international business, including government-to-government contracts for servers. It added that the company is currently discussing land acquisition in earmarked locations in states like Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra , Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat , where India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, is already building a 1GW data centre with Nvidia’s help.

The additional investment into building data centres is expected to strengthen Adani’s existing portfolio, including an underway ₹500 billion project in Maharashtra. It will also help Adani diversify his business amid high demand for AI infrastructure, induced by the rapid growth of AI services in India. The data centres are also expected to leverage Adani’s existing telecom services, which are only available for enterprises currently. Adani bought the 5G mmWave spectrum during the auction alongside industry leaders such as Reliance Jio and Airtel, but has not opened it for customers.

Adani’s data centres are expected to increase India’s server capacity, which has seen an unprecedented boom over the past few years. Adani’s closest rival, Ambani, is not only building data centres for businesses and governments, but also for consumer-facing applications and services through Reliance Jio and Jio Platforms. Other than the ventures by India’s billionaires, global leaders such as Google and Microsoft have expanded their data centre capabilities in India through fresh investments, partly because of an increase in demand and partly due to the government’s data localisation norms. They could also boost the government's Digital India programme, putting the spotlight on India as the world's emerging AI hub.

According to the report, the investment spree by Adani comes at a time when global markets are experiencing a slowdown in AI investments, especially after Chinese startup DeepSeek stunned the world with its cost-effective AI model. DeepSeek said its DeepSeek R1 is built at a fraction of the cost Microsoft-backed OpenAI injected into building GPT-4. That claim triggered the debate around whether pouring billions into AI development is even necessary. In the wake of that sentiment, OpenAI announced its GPT-4.1 foundational model earlier this month, saying that it costs 26 per cent less than the previous model.

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