Adani’s Strategic Move in India’s Data Infrastructure

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It was the evening of November 26, 2008. Inside the plush Masala Kraft restaurant at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Gautam Adani was having dinner with the then Dubai Ports chief executive Mohammed Sharaf. The two men, seated high above the city, were discussing trade and logistics when they heard the first bursts of gunfire.

Noting that India’s data infrastructure is reaching an inflection point, driven by surging AI workloads, 5G adoption and a decisive push towards data localisation, Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief executive and chief analyst, Greyhound Research, a technology-advisory firm, says that Adani’s multi-billion-dollar bet on data centres is more than an infrastructure play. It is a calculated move to capitalise on India’s emerging digital sovereignty stack.

“With its vertically integrated control over land, power and connectivity, Adani is not merely leasing capacity but is positioning as a digital landlord to both Indian enterprises and global hyperscalers,” he says.

As quoted in Outlook Business, in an article authored by Yuthika Bhargava published on August 1, 2025.

Beyond the Media Quote: Our View, In Full

Pressed for time? You can focus solely on the Greyhound Flashpoints that follow. Each one distills the full analysis into a sharp, executive-ready takeaway — combining our official Standpoint, validated through Pulse data from ongoing CXO trackers, and grounded in Fieldnotes from real-world advisory engagements.

Adani’s Data Centre Play: Monetising India’s Digital Destiny Amid AI, 5G, and Data Sovereignty

Greyhound Flashpoint — India’s data infrastructure is reaching an inflection point, driven by surging AI workloads, 5G adoption, and a decisive push towards data localisation. Per the Greyhound CIO Pulse 2025, 72% of Indian CIOs are reprioritising infrastructure investments to favour domestic data centre providers that offer better control over latency, power cost, and compliance. In this context, Adani’s multi-billion-dollar bet on data centres is more than an infrastructure play—it is a calculated move to capitalise on India’s emerging digital sovereignty stack. With its vertically integrated control over land, power, and connectivity, Adani is not merely leasing capacity—it is positioning as a digital landlord to both Indian enterprises and global hyperscalers. This bet aligns squarely with India’s AI ambitions and policy imperatives and is already altering competitive dynamics in the market.

Greyhound Standpoint — According to Greyhound Research, Adani’s foray into data centres represents a structural pivot in the Indian digital economy—one that leverages the Group’s core infrastructure strengths to address emerging national priorities in data sovereignty, AI infrastructure, and cloud-native enterprise transformation. The Group’s joint venture with EdgeConneX, AdaniConneX, exemplifies a hybrid strategy: partner-led operational capability with local execution advantage. Unlike hyperscalers that often rely on local leases, Adani builds atop its own renewable energy grid and real-estate footprint, creating a sovereign-grade, vertically integrated infrastructure stack that’s deeply attuned to regulatory and regional complexities. While firms like AWS and Azure dominate the high-trust segments of the cloud market, they are increasingly dependent on local players for low-latency colocation and jurisdiction-compliant workloads. Players like Adani, Hiranandani’s Yotta, and Airtel’s Nxtra aren’t merely competing—they’re reframing the operating model. They are landlords to the hyperscalers, operators for enterprise customers with regulatory demands, and sovereign cloud providers in their own right. Their real advantage lies not in displacing the hyperscalers, but in anchoring the India layer of global digital infrastructure.

Greyhound Pulse — Per the Greyhound CIO Pulse 2025, 72% of Indian CIOs across BFSI, public sector, and regulated industries are exploring hybrid hosting models that prioritise localised control, sovereign compliance, and renewable energy sourcing. Of these, 63% specifically cited high energy costs and latency issues with existing global cloud partners as reasons to re-evaluate their infrastructure strategy. Among CXOs considering AI investments, 58% now classify bundled infrastructure—including land, green power, and private fibre—as “mission-critical” for AI training workloads. While 67% of Indian enterprises still rely on hyperscalers for global workloads and SaaS applications, there is growing momentum to shift AI, analytics, and regulated data processing to domestic providers. In Tier II and III cities, demand is outstripping supply, with over 49% of respondents flagging capacity constraints in hyperscaler regions. The appetite for sovereign cloud and edge compute is clear, and domestic providers are rising to meet it—redefining the control plane of India’s enterprise infrastructure stack.

Greyhound Fieldnote — Per a recent Greyhound Fieldnote from a multi-vendor strategy workshop with a leading BFSI conglomerate in India’s western region, the CTO flagged repeated instances of performance degradation when running AI model training jobs over a multi-cloud setup hosted in Singapore. Compliance mandates and latency concerns prompted the team to shift inference and backup workloads to an Indian colocation facility. Initially sceptical of local providers’ uptime guarantees, the team tested three regional data centres—including one operated by a domestic player backed by a renewable energy guarantee. Not only did the facility meet 99.999% uptime, but the cost per training cycle dropped by 22% due to proximity and power optimisation. This pivot convinced the CIO to bifurcate their infrastructure roadmap: use AWS for global SaaS and APIs, while adopting a sovereign private cloud in India for regulated AI workloads. Across BFSI, pharma, and public sector verticals, we are increasingly seeing similar recalibrations that shift compute to India-centric data hubs without compromising scalability or compliance.

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