micro data centres: India hosts fewer than 10 micro data centres: paper

India hosts fewer than 10 micro data centres (MDCs), which are small facilities designed to handle critical CPU and GPU workloads that require lesser space and needs lower investments, a paper published by Nandan Nilekani-backed people+ai has found.

The organisation’s brainchild, the Open Cloud Compute (OCC) project advocates a distributed network of micro data centres.

The OCC network, unveiled by Nilekani in May, hopes to onboard at least three compute providers for a pilot by October, ET had reported on August 28. The pilot will likely be powering a hackathon at a university for undergraduate students via OCC.

OCC is an open interface for providers and customers of computing infrastructure, and a network of interoperable micro data centres in the country. According to this model, India needs 10,000 micro data centres to build its compute power.

MDCs represent the future of accessible, scalable, and cost-effective AI infrastructure in India, people+ai said in the paper.

The paper delves into the requirements for establishing MDCs. It categorises a micro data centre as one with a capacity of 25-300 kW, typically occupying 800-3,000 square feet.

These MDCs are crucial for expanding AI capabilities to the edge, the paper said.The flexible CPU-GPU ratio allows MDCs to scale efficiently, providing self-sufficient compute power necessary for India’s growing AI use cases, it said.

The paper has been authored by Shreya Mandi, Srinivas Varadarajan, Kalyan Mangalapalli, Tanvi Lall, Mohan Srinivas, Sasank Chilamkurthy, and Swaroop Rajagopalan.

Varadarajan is the chief executive of Vigyanlabs, which has two data centres in Mysuru and two in Pune in collaboration with Protean eGov Technologies. Lall is director of strategy at people+ai and Chilamkurthy is the founder of Von Neumann AI, which is building a personal AI server, JOHNAIC.

Existing MDCs in India serve both domestic and international clients, but there is a pressing need to expand beyond mega data centres to include more micro facilities, the paper said.

MDCs have use cases in sectors such as healthcare, banking, financial services, insurance (BFSI), and large-scale government operations. The increasing demand at the edge, driven by population growth in tier II and tier III cities and the rise of engineering universities focused on deep learning, highlights the importance of these centres, the paper said.

“Our analysis suggests that building green MDCs can enhance cost-effectiveness, providing a compelling economic model. We predict that an investment of Rs 60 crore in a MDC could yield a return of up to three times that of a larger data centre,” it said.

Major costs associated with software licences and certifications need to be addressed through standardisation and improved policy frameworks, the paper said.

Government initiatives, similar to the Udaan scheme, are necessary to foster the growth of smaller players in the MDC market, it said.

“The concept of Open Cloud Compute suggests that if hundreds of smaller players can operate collectively like a large cloud provider, a network of micro players can function like a mega network, driving the next phase of AI infrastructure development in India,” the paper said.