India and China Project Massive Data Center Expansions by 2030

Asia is experiencing a massive surge in data center infrastructure to support artificial intelligence and cloud computing. In India, Anarock Capital projects the data center footprint will quadruple to 101 million square feet by 2030, up from 27 million square feet in early 2026. This growth is supported by over $300 billion in investment commitments and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023, which requires domestic data storage. Capacity is expected to rise from 1.8 GW to over 6.7 GW, with major projects including a $15 billion Google investment in Visakhapatnam and a 168-MW AI-enabled facility by Reliance in Jamnagar for Meta.

While Mumbai and Chennai remain the primary hubs, expansion is diversifying into Hyderabad, Delhi-NCR, and Bengaluru. Similar growth is occurring across Southeast Asia, particularly in Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, as demand overflows from Singapore.

Simultaneously, China is facing a critical energy challenge. Wood Mackenzie projects that Chinese data centers will quadruple their electricity consumption to 774 terawatt-hours by 2030, accounting for roughly 6 percent of the nation's total power usage. To manage this demand, China is implementing a compute follows power model, shifting expansion away from tech hubs toward western regions with more abundant land and renewable energy.