Yotta Data Services in talks with PE funds to raise $1 billion

Mumbai: Yotta Data Services, the data centre unit of Mumbai-based Hiranandani group, is in talks with global and domestic funds to raise about $1 billion for its expansion plans, said people aware of the matter. Promoters of Yotta will look to sell about 25-30% stake in the company at a $3 billion valuation, the people said.

Kotak Mahindra Capital is advising the promoters on the proposed deal, and initial bids are expected in the next few weeks, the people said.

Some private equity investors however flagged the $3 billion valuation as aggressive, arguing that the business is still in the early stages of scaling up.


Yotta is simultaneously exploring an initial public offering, said the people cited above. They however clarified that the listing plans are at an exploratory stage, and that various options are on the table. A potential IPO would, however, happen in India, the people said, adding that there currently no plans to pursue an overseas listing.

A spokesperson for Yotta didn't respond to an email query.

Set up in 2019, Yotta runs hyperscale data centre campuses in Navi Mumbai and Greater Noida, providing AI cloud, sovereign cloud, co-location and managed infrastructure services. The company has been expanding its AI computing capabilities through its Shakti Cloud platform and is among the infrastructure providers empanelled under the IndiaAI Mission. It is also the only Asia-Pacific participant in Nvidia's Exemplar Cloud Initiative.

Yotta has announced plans to invest more than $2 billion for deploying 20,736 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs by this August, besides scaling up its AI infrastructure to more than 80,000 GPUs by this fiscal year-end.

India's live data centre capacity expanded to more than 1.6 GW by 2025-end from about 296 MW in 2016, a nearly 30% compound annual growth rate. The country's committed and early-stage development pipeline is currently more than 8 GW, highlighting the scale of future infrastructure requirements.

The sector's rapid growth is being fuelled by AI workloads, cloud adoption, enterprise digitisation, and stricter data localisation requirements, transforming data centres into one of the fastest-growing institutional real estate asset classes.

Global investors including Blackstone, Brookfield, Carlyle, KKR, TPG, DigitalBridge, Actis, CapitaLand, and Canadian fund CPP Investments have either invested in existing operators or partnered with strategic firms to build hyperscale campuses.

In March, Bharti Airtel's data centre unit, Nxtra Data, secured $1 billion investment for expanding across India, from a consortium of investors including Alpha Wave Global, The Carlyle Group, and Anchorage Capital.

Blackstone-backed data centre operator AirTrunk plans to invest $30 billion in India by 2030 to build digital infrastructure capacity for cloud and AI demand. Similarly, a joint venture of Brookfield and Reliance Industries announced plans to invest $11 billion to build a 1 GW data centre cluster in Visakhapatnam.