Enterprise migration to data centre driving demand: Nxtra CEO

CHENNAI: Enterprises shifting to cloud and migrating from captive data centres to colocation centres will be a major driver of growth, said Ashish Arora, chief executive of Nxtra. Nxtra is Airtel's data centre subsidiary.

He said enterprises choose data centres to scale and for sustainability, as the IT workload increases. He said its customer base has historically been enterprises and the incremental growth is coming from hyperscalers with large capacity additions.

Ashish said Nxtra is ready to host artificial intelligence (AI) workload, adding its existing campuses have headroom for new-age tech deployment.

“AI demand has 5X- 10X higher power density compared to normal workloads. All existing campuses and our new buildings have floor-loading and structure design to handle heavier workload. With higher capacity and much more heat dissipation, we need liquid cooling. We are geared up for delivering liquid cooling as well based on customer’s choice. (Moreover,) all our campuses are built with future requirements and expansion plans in mind. We have invested ahead of time in power capacity,” he said.

The company has announced plans to double existing capacity to 400 MW in around two years with Rs 5000 crore capital expenditure. This includes expansion of its facilities in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and NCR and building new campuses in Kolkata, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

Speaking to reporters, he said Nxtra’s operations use 75% green power and provide training and hiring more women employees as part of a diversity push. “We have more than 10 joint ventures with green energy companies and exploring use of inter-state green energy,” he said.

He said the company's artificial intelligence-based predictive maintenance, automated operations and energy forecasting is improving energy efficiency and bringing down the operational costs.

Nxtra implemented the AI platform starting with its Chennai data centre and plans to deploy the capabilities across all its core data centres.