Digital Realty, Brookfield Infrastructure Form Joint Venture to Grow Connected Data Community in India

Cloud and carrier-neutral data center provider Digital Realty is joining forces with Brookfield Infrastructure to develop, own and operate institutional quality data centers in India.

The 50/50 joint venture will operate under the name BAM Digital Realty, and will leverage Digital Reality’s global data center platform PlatformDIGITAL. The platform supports evolving data, control and networking demands of global enterprises; and its deployment in India will allow customers to quickly scale digital transformation by deploying critical infrastructure with a global data center provider.

The data centers will also leverage Digital Realty’s energy-efficient data center design and operating procedures, and its Pervasive Datacenter Architecture approach for the new digital workplace.

“India is a rapidly emerging data center market and offers a bright future, with accelerating adoption of digital business models among a population that recognizes the role of technology for future economic development,” said Digital Realty CEO A. William Stein.

Digital Realty’s current partnership with Brookfield and its Ascenty platform across Latin America has delivered over 250 megawatts of IT load capacity in Brazil, Chile and Mexico either fully built out or currently under construction, Stein said.

“We look forward to building upon our successful partnership with Brookfield by entering the Indian data center market together and extending opportunities for digital transformation with the global consistency of PlatformDIGITAL,” he added.

Considering India’s population, economy and data center demand, it’s a key market opportunity to extend coverage, capacity and connectivity for global service providers and local and global enterprise customers.

BAM Digital Realty plans to buy land parcels in Indian metros to develop data center campuses and support global hyperscale service providers and international and local enterprises. It also expects to design, build and operate the centers sustainably.

Arpit Agrawal, managing director and head of India & Middle East for Brookfield Infrastructure, said he is pleased to expand its partnership with Digital Realty and the company’s presence in India. Brookfield Infrastructure holds $23 billion in assets across data transmission, distribution and storage, including a portfolio of 139,000 operational telecom wireless towers in India. The company plans to expand the towers to 175,000.

“Through the development of a high-quality, multi-city, India-focused data center platform, we believe BAM Digital Realty is well positioned to play a meaningful role in addressing the large and growing data demand in the country and to offer a differentiated solution to customers,” Agrawal said.

The joint venture is expected to close in the second half of 2021.