Data centers have massive power and water needs and New Delhi needs a plan to cover this, Neil Shah tells RT India
India will run short of the key infrastructure resources needed to power the explosive growth in data centers the country is witnessing, without smart planning, a technology industry analyst told RT India.
India has about 150 operational data centers, with over 100 on the way, driven by the country’s AI boom and cloud adoption.
Data centers guzzle water and power. However, both are in scarce supply in India’s biggest cities where the bulk of them are being built – Navi Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Noida – as well as Jamnagar, RT India reported.
In 2020, India’s data centers consumed around 375 megawatts (MW) of electricity, which jumped to 1,500 MW by 2025. By 2032, the figure is projected to hit 13.56 gigawatts, a 30-fold increase in just over a decade.
A 1 MW data center requires around 26 million liters of water for cooling. A 30 MW facility needs 780 million liters, and a 160 MW one needs as much as 4.2 billion liters of water.
Over half (59%) of Indian districts faced water scarcity in 2025, and 3% are facing absolute scarcity.
Globally, there is a scramble to put guardrails to protect the environment and minimize the potential burden on local communities from data centers.
“The amount of infrastructure required, the resources required to support these gigawatts of data centers by the end of 2030 is going to be unprecedented,” a technology industry analyst at Counterpoint Research in Mumbai, Neil Shah, told RT India.
He noted that India doesn’t have enough resources and hasn’t “even planned for this particular increase.”
In Mumbai, which is on course to be one of the country’s biggest AI data center hubs, an estimated one-third of the electricity will be consumed by data centers. There are 28 new data centers being built in the city alone.
“We still have grids shared with the public infrastructure as well as these upcoming AI data centers,” Shah pointed out.
He said that there has to be “dedicated power grids and supply” built for these structures.
At some point, smart planning for the “required type of electricity, whether it’s renewables or whether it’s nuclear,” will have to come into play, Shah noted.
The approvals for future projects should be templatized to incorporate clean energy standards, emphasizing renewable energy, “whether it is about water recycling… energy efficiency,” he said.
He cited the example of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio as a template to be emulated. At its Jamnagar data facility, Reliance envisages that 50%-60% of the requirements would be met with smart renewables.
“The water recycling and everything is taken care of,” Shah pointed out.
Shah also suggested regular energy audits to scrutinize consumption patterns and separate billing standards for data center-scale electricity and water consumption.
July 15, 2026 at 10:11PM
RT