CapitaLand Investment has opened a data centre in Chennai’s Ambattur industrial area, its second facility in India, with the project planned to reach 53 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2026. The facility is being developed under CapitaLand India Trust, the Singapore-listed business trust of which CapitaLand is the sponsor.
The Chennai project has been built at an estimated cost of Rs 1,940 crore. It is intended to serve hyperscalers, neocloud companies, cloud service providers and enterprise customers, including businesses requiring computing capacity for artificial intelligence workloads.
CapitaLand Investment has three data centre projects in India with a combined planned capacity of about 200MW. The portfolio includes 108MW in Navi Mumbai, more than 50MW in Chennai and the remaining capacity in Hyderabad. The company said its Navi Mumbai facility, with its full 108MW capacity, has been leased to one of the world’s largest hyperscalers.
Gauri Shankar Nagabhushanam, chief executive officer of CapitaLand India Trust, said the company was continuing to assess investment opportunities across India, with Mumbai and Chennai among its key markets for data centre expansion. He said the company was in discussions with neoclouds, hyperscalers and enterprises for its Chennai and Hyderabad facilities.
The company said its facilities are designed as Tier III-plus data centres, a classification used for infrastructure with high levels of redundancy and availability. According to Nagabhushanam, the sites can accommodate newer chipsets and support liquid cooling at chip level, a requirement associated with high-density computing and AI workloads. He also said the facilities were equipped to support AI applications using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform.
The opening places Chennai within a growing national competition for data centre investment. Such facilities require substantial power, cooling, network connectivity and industrial land, making their expansion closely tied to the capacity of urban utilities and the availability of suitable sites. Unlike conventional commercial developments, their operational footprint is shaped less by employee density than by electricity demand, equipment loads and round-the-clock reliability requirements.
CapitaLand said its total investment in Indian data centres is estimated at S$1 billion. CapitaLand India Trust is providing about 80% of that investment, while the CapitaLand India Data Centre Fund is contributing the remaining 20%.
The Chennai facility was inaugurated in the presence of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Vijay and Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong, according to the report. CapitaLand has also invested more than Rs 6,000 crore across seven operational assets in India, including business parks, industrial and logistics facilities and lodging properties.
The company’s stated next milestone for the Ambattur project is completion of the planned 53MW capacity by the end of 2026. Discussions with potential customers for the Chennai facility are continuing, according to the company.
