AirTrunk plans $30B investment for 5GW AI data center capacity in India

The $30 billion commitment signals a rapid shift in the global AI supply chain, positioning India as a primary compute hub for high-density training and inference. For the streaming ecosystem, this massive infrastructure injection provides the localized, low-latency processing power essential for next-generation personalized video and real-time AI-enhanced content delivery. As sovereign AI initiatives gain traction, the availability of hyper-scale local capacity will likely lower the cost of deploying compute-intensive features at scale. Watch for similar large-scale capacity announcements from domestic rivals Reliance and Adani as they compete for dominance in the regional secondary compute market.

The AirTrunk investment is part of a broader infrastructure super-cycle in India, where local and global titans are racing to secure land and power for AI workloads. In February 2026, Indian conglomerates Reliance Industries and the Adani Group collectively committed over $200 billion toward AI-ready data centers and renewable energy infrastructure, per Reuters. Reliance unit Jio is currently developing a multi-gigawatt facility in Jamnagar, while Adani Enterprises has pledged $100 billion through 2035 to build sustainable, chip-ready campuses. This local competition is intensified by the 'India AI Mission,' which launched in March 2026 with an initial $1.24 billion outlay to subsidize GPU-based compute access for domestic developers, according to government filings.

Regulatory incentives are acting as a primary catalyst for these large capital deployments. Per India Briefing in June 2026, the Union Budget 2026-27 introduced a safe harbor provision and a tax holiday through 2047 for global cloud providers that process international workloads within Indian borders. This fiscal stability is a direct attempt to mitigate execution risks such as power grid congestion and high water stress, which currently affect 60% to 80% of Indian data center sites. To address these bottlenecks, operators are increasingly shifting toward modular construction and liquid cooling technologies to support rack densities that are expected to reach 1MW per rack by late 2027, according to industry reports from the GRI Data Centre India 2026 summit.

AirTrunk itself entered this market following a record-breaking $16 billion acquisition by a Blackstone-led consortium in December 2024. This deal remains Blackstone’s largest-ever investment in the Asia-Pacific region, emphasizing the firm’s 'high-conviction' theme of digital infrastructure expansion. As operational capacity in India scales toward a projected 1.7GW in 2027, the market is positioning itself to capture workloads traditionally hosted in high-cost hubs like Singapore and Hong Kong, according to analysis from Council on Energy, Environment, and Water (CEEW).