Equinix announced on Monday it has launched its first International Business Exchange (IBX) AI-ready data centre in Chennai, which it says will support business digitization, resilience and AI development in India.
The new IBX data centre in Siruseri, CN1, will be interconnected with Equinix’s Mumbai campus, which currently hosts three IBX data centres. The CN1 facility will provide 800 cabinets of initial capacity at launch, and will eventually support 4,250 cabinets.
No details were given on its IT load capacity. Equinis said it has invested US$69 million to build the initial phase.
Equinix said CN1 is engineered for 99.999% uptime and features a full suite of Equinix interconnection services, including Equinix Fabric, which enables enterprises to leverage hybrid multicloud services. It also supports liquid cooling technology, which Equinix said is essential for handling the high-density, compute-intensive workloads that are driving AI and other technologies.
Equinix also expects demand for such workloads to increase in Chennai, which is emerging as a focal point for research and AI investment in India as Tamil Nadu strengthens its position as a key innovation hub. Meanwhile, that’s happening in the context of the Indian government’s drive to become a global leader in developing and investing in emerging technologies such as AI, quantum computing, blockchain and edge computing.
In addition to the three data centres, Equinix’s Mumbai campus hosts a robust cloud ecosystem for its Indian customers, including native on-ramps to cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.
With the launch of CN1, customers in Chennai can gain low-latency access to that ecosystem, enabling seamless and secure connectivity with their business partners, customers and providers, said Manoj Paul, MD for India at Equinix.
