The meeting in New Delhi was brief, and the announcement that followed was anything but. Robin Khuda, the chief executive of AirTrunk, the Australian data-center operator backed by Blackstone, met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in early June, and days later the company said it would invest more than $30 billion in India by 2030, building more than 5 gigawatts of data-center capacity. It is the largest single commitment to Indian digital infrastructure by any company, and one of the biggest bets anywhere in the world on where the AI build-out will happen next.
AirTrunk entered India this year through the acquisition of Lumina CloudInfra, a developer with a pipeline of projects in Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad. The new commitment scales that entry into a national program, with capacity planned across multiple states and union territories. The company has already signed a letter of intent with the western state of Maharashtra for a 3-gigawatt data center near Raigad, involving an investment of about 2 trillion rupees, roughly $21 billion, in what would be one of the largest single data-center projects in the country.
The investment thesis rests on India’s position in the global technology economy. India is the world’s second-largest internet market, with more than a billion users and a digital-services industry that consumes enormous amounts of computing power. The country has been adding cloud capacity rapidly, but demand has grown faster, and analysts at Bernstein project India’s data-center capacity will rise to as much as 8 gigawatts by 2030, from about 1.5 gigawatts today. Every major cloud company has announced Indian investments, from Amazon’s expanded commitment of $75 billion by 2030 to Google’s $15 billion AI infrastructure plan and Microsoft’s $17.5 billion program.
The Indian government has made the pitch explicit. New Delhi has offered foreign cloud providers tax exemptions through 2047 on services sold overseas if the workloads run from Indian data centers, an incentive designed to pull global AI traffic into the country. Modi described AirTrunk’s investment as strengthening India’s position as a global hub for cloud computing and artificial intelligence. The combination of a huge domestic market, low-cost land and power, and policy support has turned India into the AI infrastructure world’s second battlefield, after the United States.
AirTrunk’s backers give the commitment credibility. The company is majority-owned by Blackstone, which bought it in 2024 in one of the largest private-equity deals for a data-center operator, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board holds a significant stake. The investors have deep pockets and a long time horizon, and they have pushed AirTrunk’s expansion across Asia, from its home market of Australia to Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and now India.
The company’s chief executive has framed the investment as a bet on the fundamentals: government support, a large pool of technical talent and access to renewable energy. Data centers are among the most power-hungry facilities ever built, and India’s solar and wind resources, combined with its policy push for clean energy, are part of the appeal. AirTrunk has committed to powering its facilities with renewable energy, a requirement that is becoming standard for the industry as regulators and customers demand lower emissions.
The obstacles are real. Land acquisition in India can take years, power-grid connections are contested and the state-by-state regulatory structure adds complexity to a business that depends on speed. The country’s data-center boom has also raised local concerns about water use and grid strain, the same frictions that have slowed construction in Virginia and other dense markets. AirTrunk’s plan assumes that these problems can be solved at scale, and the 2030 deadline gives it less than five years to deliver.
The competitive response is already visible. Indian conglomerates, including Reliance Industries and the Adani Group, have announced their own multibillion-dollar data-center programs, and global operators are jockeying for the same land and power. The market will not belong to any single company, but the commitments being made now will determine who controls the country’s computing infrastructure for the next decade.
The power question is the one that keeps executives up at night. India’s grid is expanding, but the pace of data-center construction threatens to outrun it, and developers are competing for the same transmission capacity. AirTrunk has said it will work with state utilities and renewable developers to secure supply, and the Maharashtra project includes plans for dedicated power infrastructure, but the company’s ability to deliver 5 gigawatts by 2030 will depend on the grid more than on its own construction crews.
AirTrunk’s bet is part of a global reordering of where AI infrastructure gets built. The United States remains the largest market, but rising power costs and community resistance have pushed developers to look elsewhere, and India, with its cheap land, young workforce and supportive government, has become the most attractive alternative. The companies that build there first will set the terms for everyone who follows.
For AirTrunk, the $30 billion pledge is the biggest test of its model. The company built its reputation on disciplined construction and high utilization in markets where it could move fast. India rewards patience more than speed, and the payoff, if it comes, will be a position in the world’s most promising new AI market. The bet is that the second-largest internet market in the world becomes the second-largest computing market as well, and that AirTrunk is there when it happens.
