By Mr. Pratap Mane, President & Country Head – India, Colt DCS
The global race for AI leadership will not be won by algorithms alone. It will be won by countries that can build the digital infrastructure capable of supporting AI at scale. While much of the conversation around Artificial Intelligence focuses on increasingly sophisticated models and breakthrough applications, the real differentiator is becoming the infrastructure that powers them. As AI moves from experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment, digital infrastructure is emerging as a defining factor of economic competitiveness.
The conversation around AI has matured rapidly. Business leaders are no longer asking whether AI will transform their organisations, but whether they possess the infrastructure needed to deploy it at scale. Competitive advantage will depend as much on resilient power, scalable compute, high-performance connectivity and sustainable infrastructure as it does on advances in AI models themselves.
This marks a fundamental shift in the role of infrastructure. For decades, it was viewed as an operational necessity that enabled business growth. Today, it is a strategic asset that shapes investment decisions, strengthens economic resilience and determines how quickly organisations can innovate. Across manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, logistics, research and data centres, AI is fundamentally redefining infrastructure requirements, making long-term infrastructure planning a boardroom priority rather than a technology discussion.
Nowhere is this transformation more evident than in data centres. They have evolved far beyond their traditional role as facilities housing IT infrastructure to become the digital backbone of the AI economy. Every intelligent application, enterprise AI deployment and data-driven innovation ultimately relies on infrastructure that can deliver resilient power, advanced cooling, secure connectivity and the ability to scale sustainably.
This is not simply an industry evolution. It is an economic opportunity.
India is uniquely positioned to become one of the world’s leading destinations for AI infrastructure. The country’s operational data centre capacity has grown from approximately 375 MW in 2020 to nearly 1.5 GW today and is projected to exceed 4 GW by 2030, reflecting the rapid acceleration of cloud adoption, AI workloads and digital transformation. Yet, while India generates nearly one-fifth of the world’s data, it accounts for only a small share of global data centre capacity, highlighting the significant headroom for future investment. Combined with a rapidly expanding digital economy, deep engineering talent and strong policy momentum around AI, India has the opportunity not only to develop AI solutions, but to become the trusted infrastructure backbone that powers them. However, this opportunity will not materialise through market demand alone. Around the
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