India to expand AI Data Centers with 5.2 Lakh GPUs by 2026 By CIOTechOutlook Team

India to expand AI Data Centers with 5.2 Lakh GPUs by 2026

CIOTechOutlook Team | Wednesday, 23 October 2024, 04:48 IST

India will increase its number of GPUs in AI-driven data centers to almost 520,000 by 2026. Ankit Agarwal, who is the managing director of STL, stated that data centres with heavy GPU usage will need 36 times more fiber compared to CPU racks.

Sterlite Technologies (STL) aims to generate 25% of its revenue from the new AI data centre fibre offering in the next three years, due to the increasing demand for expanding infrastructure in India to store data locally, as stated by a senior executive.

“In the optical domain we want to be world top three over the next three to five years,” Agarwal said, adding that the company is banking on three growth levers globally – mobile tower fiberisation for 5G backhaul and government-funded projects for fibre-to-the-home as well as data centres.

“Globally we are at about 1.5 billion 5G subscribers. That must go to about 3-4 billion subscribers in the next few years. More of the towers need to be fiberized. In India itself, 40-50% towers are connected by fibre, that has to go towards 70-80%,” Agarwal said. “Second part is a lot of government projects including India’s BharatNet and US’s BEAD project. And then third is data center expansion globally”.

He mentioned that the government is interested in establishing data center zones, akin to SEZ zones, where 30-40 data centers could be located together.