In what marks one of the single largest foreign direct investments in India’s digital infrastructure history, Australia-based hyperscale data centre specialist AirTrunk has committed to a monumental ₹2 lakh crore ($21.05 billion) investment to establish a mega data centre facility in Maharashtra.

The landmark expansion was formalized via a Letter of Intent (LoI) for land allotment exchanged directly between Maharashtra state leadership and AirTrunk’s founder and CEO, Robin Khuda, with Australian Consul General Paul Murphy in attendance. The move anchors the state as a dominant technological node in the Asia-Pacific region.

1. Project Blueprint: The 3-Gigawatt Monolith

The planned data centre is designed to scale to an unprecedented capacity layer, matching the data demands of the modern artificial intelligence wave:

• The Location: The campus will be situated at the Raigad Pen Growth Centre (also referred to as Orange City) on the outskirts of India’s financial capital, Mumbai.
• The Scale: The facility boasts an absolute capacity target of 3 gigawatts (GW), positioning it as an architectural giant compared to standard regional setups.
• The Strategic Spillover: While Mumbai historically commands nearly 50% of India’s current operational data centre capacity, land and power constraints within the city center are aggressively pushing new infrastructure developments into adjacent corridors like Thane, Navi Mumbai, and the Raigad district.

2. Institutional Backing: The Blackstone Engine

AirTrunk’s hyper-scale entry into the Indian domestic sector is heavily cushioned by elite global capital structures. Founded in 2015, the firm originally launched its footprint in Australia before systematically scaling across Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, and Hong Kong.

The company’s long-term runway is driven by its corporate parentage. In late 2024, AirTrunk was acquired by global alternative asset management titan Blackstone, alongside the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments). Following that consolidation, AirTrunk aggressively absorbed Lumina CloudInfra—Blackstone’s existing dedicated data centre arm—in April, effectively setting up the pipeline for this mega-scale Indian buildout.

3. Macro Environment: Navigating the India AI Boom

The $21 billion commitment arrives during a massive wave of capital re-allocation toward Indian data infrastructure. The country is expected to attract over $630 billion in cumulative investments from US technology corporations alone this year, strongly accelerated by lucrative local tax exemptions and operational incentives tailored for domestic data processing zones

By establishing an open-weights, highly sustainable 3 GW facility on Mumbai’s periphery, AirTrunk is creating a critical foundational resource. This infrastructure will allow major cloud service providers and enterprise entities to scale compute capabilities locally without encountering severe power bottlenecks, supporting India’s transition into a self-reliant digital economy.