India's data-centre market in 2026: reading the numbers correctly

Ask how big India's data-centre market is in 2026 and you will get several answers. JLL puts operational capacity at about 1.6 GW in mid-2026. CBRE puts it at about 1.75 GW. Cushman & Wakefield says nearly 1.8 GW. One market-research house quotes more than 5 GW. None of them is necessarily wrong; they are measuring different things.

Why the figures differ

Broker figures usually count live, operational IT capacity in commercial facilities, and each broker draws the line around which cities and which operators slightly differently. Cushman & Wakefield's figure, for example, focuses on the largest markets. Research-house estimates that run several times higher are typically measuring something broader — total installed power including facility overhead, enterprise and captive sites, or capacity at a later stage of planning. Before quoting any number, check what it counts. We quote JLL throughout our own material so our figures are like-for-like.

What the reports agree on

Growth is fast and sustained. JLL reports supply growing at about 60% a year since 2021 and projects roughly 6 GW by 2029, which it estimates will need around US$110 billion of investment. CBRE expects India to reach about 2 GW by the end of 2026 and notes that more than 15% of new commitments are linked to AI. Every report names Mumbai and Chennai as the two main hubs; JLL found that Chennai delivered half of India's new supply in the first half of 2026.

The constraint is people, not just power

Capacity on paper does not commission itself. The Uptime Institute's 2026 Global Data Center Survey, drawn from more than 800 owners and operators, found that more than half struggle to find qualified candidates for open jobs, and that a growing number of operators now run peak rack densities of 30 kW or more. High-density racks bring liquid cooling, GPU clusters and high-speed fabrics — exactly the skills that are hardest to hire.

Quadrupling capacity in three years means quadrupling the work of commissioning, monitoring, protecting and auditing it.

What this means for operators and enterprises

Three practical conclusions. First, plan for specialist skills as carefully as you plan for power: a delayed fabric or cooling commissioning delays revenue. Second, instrument from day one — power and thermal telemetry is what lets you prove efficiency and catch a hot rack before it becomes an outage. Third, treat compliance as an engineering deliverable: India's DPDP Act and CERT-In's six-hour reporting rule apply to the tenants inside these halls from their first day of operation.

Sources

JLL, India data centre 2026 mid-year report (31 August 2026). CBRE South Asia, India data centre H1 2026 findings, as reported by IBEF (October 2026). Cushman & Wakefield, India Data Centre Market H1 2026 (September 2026). Uptime Institute, Global Data Center Survey 2026 and press release (28 July 2026). Figures are quoted as published; definitions vary between sources.