AirTrunk plans $30 billion India push for 5GW data center capacity

AirTrunk said it will invest more than $30 billion in India by 2030 to build more than 5 gigawatts of data center capacity, a scale that turns the country into one of the fiercest contests for AI compute infrastructure. The Australian operator said the program will span multiple Indian states and union territories, making it clear this is not a single campus deal but a national buildout aimed at AI and cloud demand.

The size of the plan matters because 5GW is not just a balance-sheet headline. It points to enormous demand for electricity, transmission capacity, backup systems, land assembly and water for cooling, all of which can become flashpoints in fast-growing industrial regions. In practice, that means the success of the project will depend as much on grid readiness, permitting and utility coordination as on demand from cloud customers.

The announcement followed AirTrunk’s acquisition of Lumina CloudInfra in April 2026, a transaction that gave the company an initial 600MW development pipeline across Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad. Those cities already sit near some of India’s busiest digital corridors, and the earlier expansion tied to Maharashtra showed the company’s ambition to anchor itself close to major economic and power networks. AirTrunk had previously been linked to a 3GW project in Maharashtra valued at about 2 trillion rupees, or $21 billion, with land tied to the Raigad Pen Growth Centre on the outskirts of Mumbai.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed the plan as one of the largest proposed investments in India’s digital infrastructure ecosystem and said it would strengthen the country’s role as a global hub for cloud computing and AI. The political appeal is obvious: jobs, local supply chains and innovation-led growth. The harder test is whether India’s industrial policy and power realities can support data centers at this scale without deepening stress on already stretched grids, land markets and water systems.

Robin Khuda, AirTrunk’s founder and chief executive, said India is one of the world’s most attractive destinations for long-term digital infrastructure investment and argued that the AI race is now about infrastructure, not just technology. Backed by Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, AirTrunk is betting that India can absorb a wave of compute investment. Whether that bet becomes a durable industrial base or another strain on public utilities will depend on how quickly states can deliver reliable power, manage land use and spread the gains beyond a narrow set of tech corridors.