Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath inaugurated North India’s first hyper-scale data centre Yotta Yotta D1 built at the cost of Rs 5,000 crore and spread over an area of 3,00,000 square feet at the upcoming Data Centre Park in Greater Noida on Monday. Memorandums of Understanding worth Rs 39,000 crore were also signed between the Yogi Government and Hiranandani Group to be spent on projects in the next five years on the occasion, as per the official statement.
“I am delighted to see the opening of North India’s first data centre, which gives momentum to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India movement, in Greater Noida today. The data centre will increase the data storage capacity of the country, which until now stood at two percent only despite the fact that 1.5 billion mobile phones and 650 million internet users in the world are from India using 20 per cent of data. Yet for storage of data, we had to look for centres abroad,” said Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Yogi said that technology and the talented youth of India, which has been instrumental in bringing about the digital revolution in the world, will play a vital role in realising PM Modi’s goal of self-reliance and making India a $5 trillion economy if all the facilities and resources are available to them here.
Chief Minister Yogi said that Uttar Pradesh is going to become a new hub of the data centre. “Earlier, when Uttar Pradesh implemented its data centre policy, the total storage capacity in the country was only 400 MW. We set a target of 250 MW of storage capacity by 2026 with an investment of Rs 20,000 crore. And today I am happy to share that this target has been achieved in the very first year of the policy. Today, proposals of 600 MW have been received from many investors in the country and abroad,” he said.
Inviting investors to the data centre sector, the Chief Minister also informed them about the new policy. He said that in the new policy, the government has not only simplified the land allotment process but has also taken care of the needs of the investors in every aspect related to infrastructure including the availability of electricity. The CM told investors that the state will provide financial and non-financial incentives to them while ensuring the safety of their investments.
It is worth mentioning here that the data centre park is expected to increase GSDP significantly while creating new avenues for investment in view of the proposed Uttar Pradesh Global Investors Summit 2023 and creating huge employment opportunities, as per the official statement. Yogi said that Gautam Buddh Nagar has emerged as a major investment destination in the country in recent times and has a very capable workforce in the IT sector.
Taking a dig at Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav, CM Yogi said that superstition never allowed the former chief minister to visit Gautam Buddh Nagar ahead of elections whereas “They treated Gautam Buddh Nagar as a cursed city for fear of losing chair. I never bothered about the chair. I said, if the chair has to go tomorrow, it’s better it goes today itself. My commitment is to the people and they brought us back to power in 2022,” he said.
Spread over 20 acres by Hiranandani Group, this data centre park will have a total of 06 data centres. The seven-storey Yotta D-1 is the first part of this episode. Designed as per international quality standards, this exclusive data centre offers direct fibre connectivity to all major telecom operators from 4 different routes. According to the official statement, the Yotta D1 features Internet peering exchanges and direct fibre connectivity to and from global cloud operators, making it extremely useful for global connectivity. Not only this, Yotta D-1 will be the first pillar of North India’s 5G revolution.
From here, Edge data centre customers will be able to access the desired videos, games and other related data through the high-speed internet networks to the networks of Jio, Airtel, Vodafone-Idea, and BSNL. To support Digital India, this data centre will also get many other services including public cloud service, cyber security, and disaster recovery. Powered by 50 MW of power, the data centre is protected with state-of-the-art technology to ensure that thousands of millions of servers, storage and networks and the digital applications and content running on them are easily accessible to consumers with security. The data centre also has 48 hours of power backup, as per the official statement. According to an estimate, India’s data analytics industry is estimated to reach more than $16 billion by the year 2025. Therefore, the Yogi government is paying special attention to promoting investment in data centre infrastructure.
According to an official statement, the Data Center Policy was notified in 2021. Under the policy, the work of setting up of 04 Data Center Parks by various investors is currently under process with an investment of more than Rs 15,950 crore. These include M/s NIDP Developers Pvt Ltd of Hiranandani Group (Rs 9134.90 crore), M/s NTT Global Centers and Cloud Infrastructure India Pvt Ltd of Japan (Rs 1687 crore), and two projects of Adani Enterprises Ltd of Rs 2414 crore and Rs 2713 crore. With the start of these projects, thousands of people will also get employment.
