Data centre operators are turning toward India's renewable energy providers as scrutiny mounts in the United States and instability across the Middle East pushes the industry to explore alternative locations.

Kuldeep Jain, the managing director and founder of CleanMax Enviro Energy Solutions Ltd., told an interviewer in Mumbai that the renewable power requirements tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure are far larger than most people account for. He noted that even a conservative scenario of five gigawatts of data centre capacity arriving in the country would translate into demand of roughly 30 to 40 gigawatts of clean electricity — a gap he described as demand outpacing available supply. The government has separately been extending a range of inducements to data centre operators, including subsidised power tariffs, tax relief, and streamlined land approvals.

BloombergNEF data places the country at the head of Asia-Pacific data centre development activity when China is set aside.

Jain noted that opposition among US communities to the heavy energy and water demands of such installations, combined with instability linked to the expanding conflict in the Middle East, had strengthened the country's draw for those companies. A pair of Amazon's Bahrain-based data centres sustained damage following an Iranian attack there in July.

With Brookfield Asset Management providing financial backing, CleanMax has secured power-purchase agreements totalling 1.8 gigawatts — a volume that accounts for roughly one-third of all such deals signed across India over the preceding three years — with a group of AI hyperscalers that includes Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Apple Inc., and Amazon.com Inc., each of which operates large-scale, globally distributed data centre networks.

Jain noted that large cloud and AI infrastructure operators have been moving toward power agreements built around optionality — arrangements under which a company can choose to purchase only the carbon-offset attributes tied to a renewable project, bypassing any obligation to take physical electricity delivery at its own sites. Jain also described a structure in which those operators could either route power directly to their data centres or have the supplier sell it on exchanges, with the supplier then receiving the spread between the contracted tariff and the exchange realisation. He added that this retained flexibility had become the arrangement most of those operators preferred.

Jain noted that sustaining an expansion at that pace would require investment of billions of dollars directed toward renewable energy sources and storage infrastructure, and that the transaction outcome remains the same regardless of which party acts as seller.

Roughly 1.3 gigawatts of IT capacity across data centre projects in India are presently under active construction, according to BloombergNEF data. A further 3.2 gigawatts of development capacity has cleared the three-part hurdle of land acquisition, grid connection rights, and planning approval. According to Wood Mackenzie's projections, total installed capacity could reach 12 gigawatts by 2030, with the slice dedicated to AI-driven data centres growing from a narrow base to around 6.5 gigawatts — a roughly 24-fold expansion.