Adani commits $100 billion to turn India into an AI data center powerhouse

The Adani Group is placing a massive bet on the backbone of the digital age, committing $100 billion by 2035 to build a network of "AI-ready" hyperscale data centers across India. This capital infusion is the cornerstone of a broader vision to catalyze a $250 billion AI infrastructure ecosystem, effectively positioning the conglomerate as the primary landlord for the world’s most compute-intensive workloads. Following the announcement on Tuesday at India’s AI Impact Summit, shares of the group’s flagship, Adani Enterprises, climbed 2.08% in intraday trading as investors weighed the scale of a project that aims to quintuple the group's current digital capacity.

"India will not follow the AI century, India will shape it," Chairman Gautam Adani stated as he unveiled the roadmap. The plan is not just about floor space; it is a vertically integrated play that leverages Adani’s dominance in green energy. By 2035, the group intends to expand its AdaniConneX platform from its current 2-gigawatt (GW) footprint to a staggering 5 GW, all while powering these "digital factories" with renewable energy.

The business logic is clear: as AI giants like Google and Microsoft seek to diversify their physical infrastructure away from traditional hubs, India’s combination of low-cost land, massive internal demand, and a supportive regulatory environment makes it the logical frontier. Adani has already secured a $15 billion partnership with Alphabet’s Google to develop a massive campus in Visakhapatnam, which is expected to house Google’s largest data center outside the United States.

This infrastructure blitz is designed to create a "sovereign cloud" for India, reducing the nation's reliance on offshore servers and ensuring that sensitive data remains within its borders. The group estimates that its direct investment will trigger an additional $150 billion in third-party spending across server manufacturing, advanced electrical infrastructure, and software services. For the Adani Group, this is a strategic pivot from traditional heavy industries like ports and coal toward the high-margin, high-growth "new economy" sectors that global capital markets currently prize.

However, the stakes are not merely financial. The surge in data center capacity will place immense pressure on India's energy grid. Analysts from S&P Global estimate that data centers could account for 2.6% of India’s total electricity demand by 2030, up from less than 1% today. Adani’s ability to execute this $100 billion vision will depend on whether its renewable energy arm can scale quickly enough to keep these power-hungry AI clusters humming without compromising India’s climate goals.