To serve the rapidly increasing digital infrastructure demand, Equinix has announced an initial investment of over US$86 million to build its third International Business ExchangeTM (IBX®) data center in Mumbai, to be named MB3. This initial investment includes an acquisition of a parcel of land, which provides a total space of nearly 4 acres, allowing Equinix to continue growing its rich ecosystem on Platform Equinix® across India, supporting the country’s growing digital economy.
As the financial and commerce hub of India, Mumbai is the country’s top data center market and is expected to grow over 2.5 times to nearly 530 megawatts (MW) by 2023 as per a recent report by JLL. As the business capital of India, Mumbai hosts a dozen subsea cable landing points and the most cloud regions of global major cloud service providers. Equinix’s continued investment in Mumbai will further enhance its network-dense and interconnection-rich data center platform in India, meeting the significant demand from global and local customers. This expansion will support Indian organizations in enhancing their digital transformation strategies and enable global companies across sectors to expand their operations in India.
Strategically located in Mumbai’s Commercial district (Chandivali area), which is regarded as the retail data center sub-market, MB3 IBX will be adjacent to Equinix MB2 IBX data center and 1.5 kilometers away from MB1 IBX data center. The first phase of MB3 is scheduled to open in Q2 2024, providing an initial capacity of more than 1,375 cabinets, and more than 4,150 cabinets when fully built out.
Manoj Paul, Managing Director, Equinix India commented, “The increasing digitalization of economy is continuously driving the demand for data center and interconnection services in India. Particularly in Mumbai, the high demand for our digital infrastructure services among Indian and international customers is making us very optimistic about the market. We are focused on further investments in building the infrastructure in India to enable our existing and new customers in India to launch their services closer to their consumers. The close proximity of MB3 at Chandivali Farm Road to our existing data centers will enable us to form a robust campus so that our customers can leverage the dense ecosystems from any of our data centers in Mumbai. This investment will also be supporting the government’s vision to make India a key data center hub in South East Asia.
Globally, Equinix operates more than 240 data centers across 70 metros, providing digital infrastructure for more than 10,000 of the world’s leading businesses. In Asia-Pacific, Equinix currently has 52 data centers in key metros across Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea and Singapore.
As the world’s digital infrastructure company, Equinix has the responsibility to reduce the carbon footprint to create a more sustainable future. Equinix’s renewable energy coverage has been over 90% since 2018, and reached 95% in 2021. In India, the company has achieved 100% renewable energy goal. Equinix is also the first in the industry to commit to reaching global climate neutrality by 2030, backed by its science-based targets (SBT) and sustainability innovation agenda.
In 2021, Equinix entered India through the acquisition of two data centers in Mumbai, named MB1 and MB2. Providing a total of 1,350 cabinets, the two data centers in Mumbai are home to the digital infrastructure of more than 270 international brands and local companies, including the world’s leading cloud service providers, global networks, content delivery network providers, all local carriers, more than 165 internet service providers (ISPs) and five internet exchanges. In March 2022, Equinix expanded to Chennai market with a land acquisition of over 5.5 acres.
JLL acted as the exclusive real estate advisor to Equinix in connection with the land transaction.