India's data center gold rush just got a major boost. Tata Consultancy Services secured $1 billion from private equity giant TPG to build gigawatt-scale AI data centers across the country, part of a $2 billion "HyperVault" project that highlights India's emergence as a critical battleground for AI infrastructure investment.
Tata Consultancy Services just landed the backing it needed to become a major player in India's AI infrastructure race. The Indian IT giant secured $1 billion from private equity firm TPG as part of a multi-year, $2 billion project to build a network of gigawatt-scale data centers specifically designed for AI training and inference.
The timing couldn't be better. India faces a glaring infrastructure paradox - the country generates nearly 20% of the world's data but accounts for only about 3% of global data center capacity, according to Deloitte analysis. That gap has created a feeding frenzy among global tech companies racing to capture India's booming AI market.
The "HyperVault" project, as TCS and TPG are calling it, plans to develop liquid-cooled, high-density data centers with the power and network capacity required to support advanced AI workloads across major cloud regions. The company plans to build around 1.2 gigawatts of capacity in its initial phase - enough to power a small city.
But this isn't just about meeting current demand. The liquid cooling and high-density rack designs that make these facilities AI-ready also raise serious questions about resource consumption in a country already grappling with water scarcity. According to S&P Global estimates, a single 1-MW data center can require up to 25.5 million liters of water annually for cooling.
That's particularly concerning in urban hubs like Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai, where much of India's existing data center capacity is concentrated and water stress is already a daily reality. The rapid expansion of AI infrastructure also puts additional pressure on India's power grid and land availability - two other bottlenecks that industry analysts say could limit growth.
Yet global tech companies are treating India as their next frontier. Microsoft committed $3 billion over two years for India's cloud and AI infrastructure. went even bigger, announcing to build a gigawatt-scale AI data center hub in Andhra Pradesh. And committed for AWS cloud infrastructure.
