India’s data centre ecosystem is entering a decisive phase. As artificial intelligence, cloud services, digital public infrastructure and other data-intensive industries expand, data centres are evolving from commercial facilities into strategic infrastructure central to India’s digital economy, AI ambitions and technological sovereignty.
Developed through extensive stakeholder consultations and secondary research, The Dialogue’s latest research report, Building India’s Data Centre Ecosystem: A National Policy Framework for Sustainable and Sovereign Digital Infrastructure, draws on insights and contributions from 50 stakeholders across government, industry, academia, financial institutions, technology companies, start-ups and civil society.
The report examines what India will need to move beyond simply adding data centre capacity towards building a resilient, sustainable, accessible and globally competitive national compute ecosystem. It explores the growing importance of heterogeneous and inference-ready compute, geographic distribution of data centre capacity, power and water requirements, sustainability, interoperability, affordable access to compute, domestic supply chains, workforce development and stronger coordination between the Centre and states.
At its heart is a simple proposition: India should not merely seek to build more data centres. It must build the right data centres, in the right locations, with the right compute architectures, energy systems and supporting ecosystems.
A special foreword by Phani Nagarjuna
We are privileged to feature an esteemed foreword by Phani Nagarjuna, Sovereign AI Strategist, Founding Global CEO of Aikam, Silicon Valley Executive & Entrepreneur. In “Architecting Sovereign Compute for the Intelligence Age,” he situates India’s data centre ambitions within the wider global shift towards sovereign AI and compute infrastructure, reflecting on strategic autonomy, distributed architecture, sustainability by design, community-centric development and open interoperability.
