The hidden industrial machine behind everyday India.
Your ₹20 UPI payment is not allowed to leave India. That rule built buildings
Since April 2018 the RBI has required every payment record to be stored only in India. Follow one chai-stall QR scan and you find the anchor tenant of India's data-centre industry.
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Jamnagar: why Reliance is building India's AI backbone next to its refinery
A quarter of India's refining capacity sits in one Reliance fence. Now the same site is promised 120 MW of AI compute by December, on solar power that has not yet arrived.
What is a megawatt of data centre? A field guide to MW, PUE, Tiers and GPU-hours
MeitY says India has about 1,575 MW of data centres. CBRE says it is heading for 2 GW. Both are right. Here is what every word in those headlines is actually counting.
Online before China? The 1995 boast, and the state decisions behind India's data centres
VSNL's Independence Day internet was not first in Asia. What it began was a chain of state choices, from STPI's earth stations to RBI's data rule, that private capital has filled ever since.
The 2047 tax holiday, read carefully: the concrete must be Indian, but only on paper
India will not tax foreign cloud firms' global income from Indian data centres until 2047. An August amendment lowered the gates further. What the bargain asks for in return is thinner than it sounds.
India can write its own AI. It cannot yet make the thing that runs it
Sarvam and BharatGen trained Indian models on Indian soil. Underneath them sits imported silicon, and the terms of import are written in Washington. A floor-by-floor walk through India's AI stack.
IndiaAI rents its GPUs by the hour. The numbers show who pays for them
The IndiaAI Mission owns almost none of its 45,000-odd GPUs. It empanels private operators and pays part of the bill. Here is what that has bought, and what it has not.
AI & Data Centers
India’s newest heavy industry does not look like one.
Open the desk →- 01
Everyone else built data centres near the cables. Reliance is building one next to its own power.
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A data centre is a power plant running backwards. Count its megawatts, not its floors.
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Every gigawatt India announces today walks through a door the state opened decades earlier.
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The cloud can be foreign. The concrete only needs an Indian address.
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India can write its own AI. It cannot yet make the thing that runs it.
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More from the desks
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Visakhapatnam, the AI coast: who gave up the land under India's biggest compute bet
The grid before the plan: data centres are joining India's peak the costliest way
Why India's data centres live by the sea
Thirty jobs per 100 MW is America's number. India's is bigger, and still no Bhilai
A fifth of the world's data, 2% of its data centres: checking India's favourite ratio
