India’s TCS gets TPG to fund half of $2B AI data center project

Core Insights - Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has secured $1 billion from TPG for a $2 billion project to develop gigawatt-scale data centers in India, named "HyperVault" [1] - India generates nearly 20% of the world's data but only has about 3% of global data center capacity, highlighting a significant demand-supply gap for AI compute [2] - The HyperVault project aims to create liquid-cooled, high-density data centers to support advanced AI workloads across major cloud regions [3] Industry Challenges - Liquid cooling and high-density rack designs are becoming common due to the high power and heat generated by GPUs used for AI, raising concerns about resource use in water-scarce regions like India [4] - Existing water stress in urban hubs such as Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai complicates operations, with a 1-MW data center load potentially requiring up to 25.5 million liters of water annually for cooling [5] - The rapid construction of AI data centers may further strain India's power and land resources, which are already bottlenecks in major urban areas [6] Investment Landscape - Global tech companies view India as a key area for building AI infrastructure, with over $32 billion invested in data center infrastructure in the last two years [7] - Microsoft plans to invest $3 billion over two years in India's cloud and AI infrastructure, while Google has committed $15 billion over five years for a gigawatt-scale AI data center hub in Andhra Pradesh [8] - Amazon has also pledged $12.7 billion to develop AWS cloud infrastructure in India through 2030 [8]