Mumbai, Jul 14 (PTI) Brookfield Infrastructure on Wednesday announced an equal joint venture with Digital Realty to develop and operate data centres in the country.

The joint venture, which will operate under the brand name BAM Digital Realty, has been formed because India is seen as a high-growth market, with data centre demand expected to significantly increase driven by rapidly growing data consumption, digitisation of the economy, the onset of 5G and data localisation trends.

It can be noted that the data centres have seen a surge in investment announcement over the last few years, with names like Adani, Hiranandani, Japan's NTT etc already being present or evincing an entry with mega investments. Digital Realty is the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions.

BAM Digital Realty intends to acquire land parcels in multiple Indian metros for the development of data centre campuses to support the needs of global hyperscale service providers as well as international and local enterprises, an official statement said.

“India is a rapidly emerging data centre market and offers a bright future, with accelerating adoption of digital business models among a population that recognises the role of technology for future economic development,” said Digital Realty chief executive officer A William Stein.

Stein said it has an existing partnership with Brookfield under its 'Ascenty platform' in Latin America, which has already delivered long-term value to our customers, with over 250 megawatts of IT load capacity in Brazil, Chile and Mexico either fully built out or currently under construction.

"We look forward to building upon our successful partnership with Brookfield by entering the Indian data centre market together and extending opportunities for digital transformation with the global consistency of Platformdigital,” Stein added.

Brookfield Infrastructure's data infrastructure portfolio currently includes USD 23 billion in assets across data transmission, distribution, and storage, including a portfolio of 1,39,000 operational telecom wireless towers in India, which it intends to expand to 175,000 over the near term, as per an official statement.

Apart from that, Brookfield has over a decade of experience investing in India, with approximately USD 20 billion of assets under management including infrastructure, renewable power, real estate, and private equity, it said.

“Through the development of a high-quality, multi-city, India-focused data centre platform, we believe BAM Digital Realty is well positioned to play a meaningful role in addressing the large and growing data demand in the country and to offer a differentiated solution to customers,” Brookfield's head of India and Middle East Arpit Agrawal said.

The JV is expected to get regulatory approvals by the second half of the year.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)