Investment

Airtel’s Nxtra gets US$1b injection to expand data centre business

Airtel’s Nxtra gets US$1b injection to expand data centre business

Bharti Airtel’s data centre subsidiary Nxtra has secured an investment deal worth US$1 billion from Alpha Wave Global, Carlyle and Anchorage Capital via their respective affiliates to expand its network across India and accelerate growth.

Under the deal announced on Monday, Alpha Wave Global will invest US$435 million, Carlyle US$240 million and Anchorage Capital US$35 million, with Airtel infusing the remaining US$290 million.

The final ownership breakdown remains subject to post-closing adjustments, but Airtel said it would retain a controlling take in Nxtra regardless. Pending regulatory approvals in India, Nxtra is expected to be valued at around US$3.1 billion after the transaction closes.

Nxtra plans to use the money to extensively scale its infrastructure in India and broaden its portfolio of services, targeting enterprises, hyperscalers, and government organisations.

“With around 300 MW capacity today, we aim to scale to 1 GW in the next few years, targeting around 25% market share,” said Airtel’s executive vice chairman Gopal Vittal in a statement.

Vittal added that strategic partnerships with global investors and technology leaders are central to Airtel’s growth roadmap. “With strong market demand, we are committed to stepping up investments and strengthening India’s position as a leading data centre hub.”

The Nxtra injection comes in the midst of India’s current data centre boom, which Airtel said is driven by accelerating digital transformation of enterprises, rising adoption of cloud services, and expanding demand from hyperscalers. Savills India has forecast India’s data centre market to grow at a CAGR of around 21% between 2024 and 2030 to reach nearly 3,400 MW of IT capacity.

Alpha Wave focuses on backing AI-first businesses including Anthropic, OpenAI, Cerebras, SpaceX, X.ai, Ramp, Cognition and Long Lake Management.

“India has an immense AI opportunity ahead of it – Indians already meaningfully interact with and on Chat GPT, Claude and other AI platforms,” said Alpha Wave co-founder Navroz D. Udwadia. “As such India is set to see its data centre capacity grow meaningfully to keep up with hyperscaler and LLM demand.”

Kapil Modi, Partner at Carlyle India Advisors, added that Nxtra has made significant progress in expanding its capabilities, strengthening customer relationships and building a scalable platform. “We have built a strong partnership with Airtel and continue to believe Nxtra is well-positioned to benefit from India’s long-term digital infrastructure tailwinds.”

Nxtra currently operates 14 large core data centres and over 120 edge facilities across India, offering co-location, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and edge computing services. It has launched one AI-ready data centre in Pune, and is developing additional AI-ready campuses in Chennai, Mumbai, and Kolkata.

Last October, Airtel and Google signed a five-year partnership deal to invest a combined US$15 billion in Google’s first AI hub and gigawatt-scale data centre in Visakhapatnam, with AdaniConneX roped in as an ecosystem partner in the project.

Nxtra expanded its operations to Africa at the end of 2023.



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