Intelligence

India's data centre build-out, and Dholera's honest position in it

Published 3 August 2026. Facts verified to 27 July 2026 unless dated otherwise.

Dholera's data centre announcements are usually reported without the market they sit inside. With that market in view, both the opportunity and the difficulty become much clearer.

The market, in verified numbers

• Installed base: about 1.8 GW of operational IT capacity as of mid-2026, with 258 MW added in H1 2026, up 59% on H1 2025 REPORTED. CBRE recorded stock exceeding 1,700 MW at end-2025 with 440 MW added that year.
• Forecast: Wood Mackenzie projects 12 GW operational by 2030, roughly 40% compound growth, with AI-dedicated capacity rising from 275 MW in 2025 to about 6,546 MW by 2030 REPORTED.
• Pipeline: Knight Frank India put the national development pipeline at 8.33 GW, of which about 322 MW is under construction and 2,920 MW at committed stage REPORTED.
• Concentration: Mumbai holds over half of operational inventory; Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru together account for nearly 90% of tier-I capacity REPORTED.
• Power: data centre electricity demand is forecast to rise from about 10 TWh in 2025 to 191 TWh by 2040, roughly 7% of national demand REPORTED.

The constraint that decides site selection

Wood Mackenzie's finding is the one that matters most for Dholera: reliable, cost-competitive power has overtaken land and capital as the defining factor in Indian data centre siting, and the binding constraint is access to firm, round-the-clock power REPORTED. Savills reached a compatible conclusion, naming reliable power and suitable land parcels as the biggest development challenges.

That reframes Dholera's pitch precisely. Its advantage is not that it has land, every greenfield site has land. Its advantage is that it sits in a state with 69 GW of installed capacity of which 47 GW is renewable REPORTED, next to its own solar park with 300 MW commissioned DURABLE, in a policy environment that pays for power. Its disadvantage is equally clear: it is not Mumbai, it has no submarine cable landing, and connectivity is the second constraint after power.

What Gujarat is doing about it

The Viksit Gujarat Data Centre Policy 2026-29, announced 9 July 2026, targets roughly 7.5 GW of capacity and about Rs 6 lakh crore of investment DURABLE. Its instruments are specific: a minimum approved IT load of 150 MW to qualify, a 2.5% capital subsidy for projects located in Dholera SIRSpecial Investment Region: a statutory zone under the Gujarat SIR Act 2009 with its own development authority. specifically, up to 4% interest subsidy, a Rs 1 per unit power tariff subsidy for 20 years, 100% reimbursement of electricity duty for 20 years, and full stamp duty and registration exemption on land REPORTED on the itemised terms.

The Dholera-specific capital subsidy is the giveaway: the state is explicitly steering hyperscale load toward the SIR rather than letting it settle near Ahmedabad. Gujarat is also evaluating proposals for submarine cable landing stations on its coast, with one candidate landing point reported near Bhavnagar, close to Dholera REPORTED at low confidence. If a cable lands there, the connectivity objection weakens materially.

Dholera's actual data centre position

One government-channel commitment: the Gujarat government signed an agreement with L&T Vyoma for a 250 MW green AI-ready data centre at Dholera with Rs 25,000 crore of investment REPORTED, carried by Prasar Bharati in February 2026. Beyond that sit much larger announcement-stage plans, tracked with their tiers on our capital ledger and analysed on the data centre page.

For scale, the competition is not theoretical: Google broke ground on a gigawatt-scale AI hub at Visakhapatnam in April 2026, Meta and Reliance announced a 168 MW facility at Jamnagar in Gujarat in June 2026, Adani has committed to 5 GW nationally, and Andhra Pradesh has been notably aggressive with land discounts and tariff support REPORTED. Dholera is competing in a real market against states writing large cheques, and the honest question is not whether gigawatts were announced there but whether firm power, fibre and a cable landing arrive before the pipeline chooses elsewhere.