Reliance Industries has entered into an agreement to invest alongside Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty in their Indian platform set up for developing data centers across the country.

With this new alliance, the existing joint venture between Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty known as BAM Digital Realty will see Reliance Industries holding 33.33% stake and become an equal partner.

The joint venture will now be branded as ‘Digital Connexion: A Brookfield, Jio and Digital Realty Company’, the companies said in a regulatory filing.

Through this alliance, Reliance Industries will be investing Rs 378 crore in five Indian wholly-owned subsidiaries of Mercury Holdings SG, a joint venture between Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty.

RIL has also committed to invest further amounts in equity and debt securities of the Indian SPVs and any other new SPV that may be set up by Mercury India SG FDI up to Rs 622 crore, as and when calls are made, the company said in an additional regulatory filing.

“The partnership will help us serve our enterprise and small and medium business clients with cutting-edge, plug-and-play solutions delivered from the cloud and lead their digital transformation and make them more competitive and efficient,” said Kiran Thomas, CEO, Jio Platforms.

The joint venture will be positioned to serve global and local enterprises, small and medium business, and the startups of India, for their cloud and colocation requirements as they move their compute resources on the cloud and off-premise.

“We are pleased to expand our existing partnership with Reliance and add their deep expertise in the Indian telecom, tech, and data landscape to the platform. Data Centers provide essential services and critical infrastructure to support the digitalization that is taking place in every aspect of life in India,” said Arpit Agrawal, MD, Head of Infrastructure, India & Middle East, Brookfield.

The platform is currently developing data centers in key locations of Mumbai and Chennai. Its first 20 MW greenfield data center on a 100 MW campus in Chennai is expected to be completed by the end of 2023. The alliance recently announced the acquisition of 2.15 acres of land in Mumbai, to build a 40 MW data center.

Given the location of these sites, the data centers will be connected to critical terrestrial connectivity infrastructure, as well as undersea cables, and will become hubs for global connectivity for Indian companies and gateways into India for multinational companies.

“India is a mostly untapped market for the data center industry driven by the rapid adoption of digital business models, the world’s largest population, and a government that recognizes the role of technology for future economic development,” said Serene Nah, MD & Head of Asia Pacific, Digital Realty.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to complete in around 3 months.

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