CapitaLand India Trust acquiring Chennai site to develop 19.4b rupee data centre
Michelle Zhu
CAPITALAND India Trust is acquiring a freehold 4.01-acre site in Ambattur, Chennai, for about 832.8 million rupees (S$14.1 million) to develop its third data centre in India.
Acquisition of the site is expected to be completed by December 2022, while the data centre is scheduled for completion by end-2025.
Including the site acquisition, the project is estimated to cost CapitaLand India Trust some 19.4 billion rupees over the next four to five years. It will be funded through a combination of debt and internal resources.
Both the acquisition and the project are expected to increase the trust’s total portfolio size – including committed investment pipeline – by 1.7 per cent to about 25.7 million square feet (sq ft) from 25.3 million sq ft.
The proposed data centre facility is estimated to have a power capacity of 55 megawatts, as well as the capacity to host approximately 4,900 racks and operate at a power usage effectiveness of approximately 1.45 when fully developed.
According to the trustee-manager, this will allow the facility to host customers such as global technology giants and cloud service providers, as well as large domestic enterprise clients.
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In a bourse filing on Tuesday (Dec 13), the trustee-manager said it sees the project as an opportunity to further diversify into an “attractive and highly scalable new economy asset class” amid rising demand for data centres in India.
It also highlighted Ambattur as a preferred data centre location given its proximity to sea cable landing stations, freehold land parcels with clear title, reliable power supply and developed infrastructure.
Lastly, the trustee-manager believes the project will generate robust institutional activity given strong investor and corporate interest in India’s data centre sector.
“With this latest acquisition, CapitaLand India Trust will have a presence in India’s key data centre markets – Navi Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai, and we are also planning to develop a fourth data centre in Bangalore. This will allow us to expand in the resilient and highly scalable data centre asset class, diversify our data centre portfolio geographically, and enable us to better serve our customers across the country,” said the trust’s chief executive Sanjeev Dasgupta.
Units of the trust closed on Monday S$0.02 or 1.8 per cent lower at S$1.12.
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