

Stocks to watch amid India's AI-driven data-centre boom
data centres are the refineries converting it into AI-ready fuel. And India is fast emerging as the next global hub.The country generates nearly 20% of the world's data but hosts only 3% of global data centre capacity.
This creates a structural supply gap that global technology companies are now rushing to address.According to Colliers India, India's installed data-center capacity has expanded from 0.3 gigawatt (GW) in 2018 to 1.26 GW by April 2025. This was driven by a nearly 30-fold rise in data traffic since FY17, driven by smartphones, OTT platforms, digital payments, and e-commerce.So, it’s still early days.
Jefferies estimates capacity could quintuple to 8 GW over the next five years, implying US$ 30 billion (bn) i.e., ₹2.7 trillion (tn) of investment.With hyperscalers such as Google ($15 billion), AWS ($ 8.3 billion), OpenAI, Reliance ($11 bn), and TCS ($6.5 bn) committing large sums to AI-focused infrastructure, India's data centre expansion has moved firmly into the execution phase.The buildout is now shaping up as a multi-year capex cycle. This is expected to open a large market for real estate ($6 bn), electrical and power systems ($10 bn), racks ($7 bn), cooling systems ($4 bn), and network infrastructure ($1 bn).Here are five stocks that can ride the data centre boom:E2E Networks is a leading Indian hyperscaler and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, specialising in advanced Cloud GPU infrastructure.A key differentiator for E2E is its commitment to Sovereign AI.The company's compute instances are distributed across four data centres located in Noida, Chennai, and Mumbai, ensuring data locality for India-centric workloads.Within these data centres, E2E uses InfiniBand NDR with speeds up to 3.2
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