Sify Infinit Spaces, set to become India’s first publicly listed data center operator, says the artificial intelligence boom is accelerating demand for computing power at a pace the country has never witnessed.
But even as the sector surges, the company is taking a deliberately cautious approach to expansion, tempering future investments to avoid being caught in a potential capacity glut.
In an interview with Reuters in late November, CEO Sharad Agarwal said the company aims to pursue growth that is “responsible and calculated,” even as AI workloads drive unprecedented demand for digital infrastructure around the world. He emphasized that AI itself is not a bubble, but cautioned that herd mentality among developers and operators could lead to aggressive overbuilding.
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Agarwal said Sify’s perspective is shaped by its three decades in India’s technology cycles. The parent company, Sify Technologies, was one of the country’s first private internet service providers and a major player during the first internet boom.
“We’ve seen the dot-com bubble, we’ve seen the subprime crisis, and we have seen quite a few cycles in the past. We are able to cut through the reality and ‘bubble-ness’ of a technological development,” he said.
India’s data center market is undergoing rapid expansion driven by cloud adoption, e-commerce, banking digitization, and — increasingly — AI. According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, national data center capacity is projected to more than triple to 4.7 gigawatts by 2030, up from 1.3 GW in April 2025. Much of this growth is fueled by hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft — which still dominate demand for compute capacity.
Sify Infinit currently operates 14 data centers across India and has 11 more in development. Agarwal said the company’s two- to three-year project lead times give it the flexibility to speed up or slow down depending on how demand evolves. That flexibility has become central to its strategy amid concerns that rapid expansion across the industry could outpace actual usage.
While hyperscalers remain its largest clients, Sify is diversifying aggressively into banks, financial services, media companies, and e-commerce platforms. Agarwal said this shift is meant to reduce exposure to a few major cloud providers and capture rising demand from domestic sectors that are increasingly adopting AI.
The company is preparing for a 37-billion-rupee ($410.87 million) initial public offering, for which it filed draft papers in October. If successful, it will become India’s first listed data center operator, a milestone that could set a benchmark for future digital infrastructure listings in the country.
Sify is also investing heavily in edge data centers — smaller, local facilities that reduce latency for users. Agarwal said these will play a larger role as streaming, online gaming, and digital entertainment gain momentum in non-metro Indian cities. The company has already begun constructing an edge data center in the eastern port city of Visakhapatnam, a region now attracting major technology and industrial investments from Reliance, Adani, and Google.
He said the combination of AI-driven demand, rapidly digitizing industries, and the expansion of content consumption outside major metros has created one of India’s most promising infrastructure opportunities in years. At the same time, he warned that companies must avoid repeating past mistakes by overestimating capacity needs.
India’s data center sector, he suggested, is entering a rare moment where opportunity and risk are rising at the same time — and only operators with discipline will be positioned to withstand the next correction.