Major cities shun data centres for sucking out power

NEW DELHI: Major global cities like Amsterdam and Singapore are shunning any new datacentres because they "suck out" power, and we need to be circumspect about concentrating all the capacities in or around the financial capital, a senior industry official said.

Rather than concentrating the capacities in one city like Mumbai or Delhi or Chennai, there has to be a diversification in geographical locations, the executive from global tech major Microsoft suggested.

"Many of the developed cities, many of the developed countries have actually stopped building datacentres in those cities. Cities like Amsterdam, modern city like Ireland, extremely modern city like Singapore...they have almost stopped development of new datacentres in their cities. They are sucking out entire power of that city," Rahul Dhar, country director, data centres, for Microsoft, said.

He said the global experience gives something to learn for India and wondered if we have a task force working on the same.

"How can we completely decongest a city like Mumbai because it (datacentres) is sucking out the entire power of Mumbai or may be some other city like Chennai or New Delhi?" he questioned.

It can be noted that up until a few years ago, Maharashtra was facing an acute shortage of power and it was an islanding system that saved its capital Mumbai from the wider woes of the state. Speaking at the same event, Sify Technologies' Kamal Nath said his company set up India's first datacentre in the Vashi railway station because of higher assurance of power supply at the site.

At present, over half of the datacentre capacity of the country is concentrated in Mumbai and estimates suggest the same contribution to continue even as the industry grows significantly owing to increased digital adoption, executives said.