Reliance Industries partners with Brookfield Infrastructure, Digital Realty for its India data center business

Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries recently entered into an agreement to invest alongside Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty in their Indian SPVs set up for developing data centres in India.

According to the company's statement, RIL will hold a 33.33% stake in each of the Indian SPVs and become an equal partner.

Digital Realty Trust is the provider of cloud and carrier-neutral data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions globally, with 300+ data centres across 27 countries.

They have a joint venture with Brookfield Infrastructure that is developing high-quality, highly-connected, scalable data centres to meet the critical infrastructure needs of enterprises and digital services companies in India.

RIL said that it will become an equal partner in the JV and will be branded as ‘Digital Connexion: A Brookfield, Jio and Digital Realty Company’.

The JV is currently developing data centres in marquee locations in Chennai and Mumbai.

The company said that the first 20 megawatts (MW) greenfield data centre (MAA10) on a 100 MW campus in Chennai is expected to be completed by the end of 2023.

This comes after the acquisition of 2.15 acres of land in Mumbai to build a 40 MW data centre. 

Kiran Thomas, CEO, Jio Platforms Limited, said, “We are excited to partner with Digital Realty, one of the most innovative data center companies globally and with Brookfield, our existing and trusted partner. The partnership will help us serve our enterprise and SMB clients with cutting-edge, plug-and-play solutions delivered from the cloud and lead their digital transformation and make them more competitive and efficient. The unique and highly engaging consumer and home experiences that we are offering and further innovating on, such as high-definition live content, AR / VR experiences, cloud gaming, immersive shopping experiences and cloud PC have massive compute capacity requirements. We would like to thank the Indian government for granting infrastructure status to data centers and for creating a favorable ecosystem for their development and operations, which is critical for India’s vision to become a $1 Trillion digital economy by 2025.”

Arpit Agrawal, Managing Director, Head of Infrastructure, India & Middle East, Brookfield, added, “We are very pleased to expand our existing partnership with Reliance and add their deep expertise in the Indian telecom, tech and data landscape to the platform. Data Centers provide essential services and critical infrastructure to support the digitalization that is taking place in every aspect of life in India. Together with Reliance and Digital Realty, we look forward to providing the best of solutions to the digital transformation needs of Indian and global corporates.”

Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas acted as legal advisor, and Deloitte, Haskins & Sells LLP acted as accounting and tax diligence advisor to RIL.

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