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Equinix, Inc, a US-based digital infrastructure company, announced on Thursday an initial investment of over $86 million to build its third International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Mumbai, to be named MB3.
This initial investment includes an acquisition of a parcel of land, which provides a total space of nearly four acres, allowing Equinix to continue growing its ecosystem on Platform Equinix across India, supporting the country’s growing digital economy.
Manoj Paul, Managing Director, Equinix India commented, “The increasing digitalization of the economy is continuously driving the demand for data center and interconnection services in India. Particularly in Mumbai, the high demand for our digital infrastructure services among Indian and international customers is making us very optimistic about the market. We are focused on further investments in building the infrastructure in India to enable our existing and new customers in India to launch their services closer to their consumers."
Mumbai is the country’s top data center market and is expected to grow over 2.5 times to nearly 530 megawatts (MW) by 2023 as per a recent report by JLL. As the business capital of India, Mumbai hosts a dozen subsea cable landing points and the most cloud regions of global major cloud service providers.
Equinix’s continued investment in Mumbai will further enhance its network-dense and interconnection-rich data center platform in India, meeting the significant demand from global and local customers. This expansion will support Indian organisations in enhancing their digital transformation strategies and enable global companies across sectors to expand their operations in India.
Globally, Equinix operates more than 240 data centers across 70 metros, providing digital infrastructure for more than 10,000 of the world’s leading businesses. In Asia-Pacific, Equinix currently has 52 data centers in key metros across Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.
In 2021, Equinix entered India through the acquisition of two data centers in Mumbai, named MB1 and MB2. Providing a total of 1,350 cabinets, the two data centers in Mumbai are home to the digital infrastructure of more than 270 international brands and local companies, including the world's leading cloud service providers, global networks, content delivery network providers, all local carriers, more than 165 internet service providers (ISPs) and five internet exchanges. In March 2022, Equinix expanded to Chennai market with land acquisition of over 5.5 acres.
JLL acted as the exclusive real estate advisor to Equinix in connection with the land transaction.
