India’s data centre ecosystem has experienced remarkable growth in recent months. Domestic players and global giants like Google, AWS and Microsoft are announcing increasingly ambitious expansion plans.
This surge is primarily being driven by the widespread adoption of consumer AI products, with India now ranking second globally in user numbers for several major platforms.
At the same time, numerous national and state policies have been established to encourage investment in data centres and to seize the opportunities created by growing demand.
Beyond technical infrastructure, these projects promise substantial employment generation. In February, homegrown data centre company CtrlS announced its new data centre in Chennai, which is expected to create 500 direct and 9,000 indirect jobs.
Similarly, in April, Sify Technologies unveiled its plans for its Chennai 02 data centre campus, with the potential to create employment for up to 10,000 people.
Notably, data centres in India are not only located in IT hubs like Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi but are also expanding into Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities such as Nagpur, Raipur, Coimbatore, Nashik and others.
This rapid growth is set to create widespread employment opportunities.
This growth is expected to generate employment opportunities across these regions. Yet, the biggest bottleneck lies in the talent pool, which is struggling to keep up with infrastructure expansion.
The Need for Upskilling
“India’s data centre industry is expanding rapidly, but talent readiness hasn’t kept pace, especially in critical domains like high-voltage electrical operations, liquid cooling and advanced HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) systems,” said Roopesh Kumar, head of data centre projects at Sify, in an interaction with AIM.
He pointed out that while technicians are adept in uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and diesel generator (DG) systems, practical experience with grid interconnects, relay coordination, power-quality analytics and liquid-cooling hydraulics remains limited.
This presents a significant opportunity to upskill the Indian workforce. “Frameworks under Skill India and NSDC can help formalise and scale data-centre-specific qualifications,” Kumar explained.
Skillsets can span from ITI to degree level, covering roles such as EPMS specialists, who monitor and optimise energy and power management systems; controls engineers, professionals who design and maintain automated systems; and liquid-cooling specialists.
According to Kumar, the impact extends beyond technical training. It doesn’t just professionalise traditional roles like electrical, plumbing and HVAC, but also lifts wages, improves job mobility and opens formal career pathways in operations and maintenance across Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities.
In one such announcement, Submer, the Spanish giant specialising in liquid cooling solutions, recently partnered with the Madhya Pradesh government to establish a data centre.
The company also plans to manufacture data centre components locally in India. While most announcements focus solely on infrastructure metrics, such as gigawatts or investment size, Submer highlighted a different goal: workforce development.
Submer is launching an ambitious workforce development programme in India, aiming to address what co-founder Daniel Pope calls “a global challenge, which is the lack of workforce for the data centre industry”.
The company plans to create 5,000 jobs within the next month, with a focus on the increasingly interconnected mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) and IT operations required for modern AI infrastructure.
Submer is set to collaborate with leading skill development agencies and plans to explore MoUs with state governments to roll out these initiatives on a larger scale.
In the interaction with AIM, Pope identified a fundamental gap in technical education that extends beyond India. Advocating for a systematic curriculum reform, he said, “When kids are in schools, they should be taught what a data centre is and why it’s there.”
“Because they learn about power plants, hydro plants, solar, renewables and so on, but you don’t learn anything about how the internet works.”
Moreover, the data centres will also generate an increasingly high demand for the underlying technology services that power the infrastructure.
The Technical Frontier
A Nasscom report from July stated that the growing data centre ecosystem is expected to lead to a surge in the number of engineers, cybersecurity experts and specialists in virtualisation and containerisation.
“Ideally, every megawatt (MW) of data centre capacity creates 2,000 jobs,” the report stated, quoting the head of data centre research and advisory at a leading data centre consulting firm.
This presents a valuable opportunity for aspiring engineers and those outside academia to work at these data centres.
During a conversation with AIM, Madhuri Mhamankar, the chief people officer at Yotta, emphasised that software engineers working in AI data centres need to excel in GPU programming, data pipeline optimisation and cloud-native orchestration.
This means they must be proficient with tools and frameworks like CUDA, TensorRT, Kubernetes and Docker.
“Expertise in high-speed networking (InfiniBand), distributed storage (NVMe-over-Fabrics), and sustainable computing (liquid cooling, green energy) is critical,” Mhamankar added.
“With these skills, you’re the architects of the intelligent infrastructure powering tomorrow’s AI-driven world.”
India’s third-party capacity is projected to double by 2028 due to increased focus on AI, reaching 2.5 GW from 1.25 GW in FY2025, as per an ICRA report.
Kumar explained that AI-ready capacity is expanding at a quicker rate than traditional data centre capacity worldwide, with India expected to follow this trend.
He emphasised that this shift highlights the importance of building deep technical and operational skills in data centre engineering as a highly future-proof career option.
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