Bharti Airtel Breaks Ground on 5MW Data Center in Northeast India
January 30, 2026
In a significant move to expand digital infrastructure beyond India's major metropolitan hubs, telecom giant Bharti Airtel has commenced construction of a new data center in the northeastern state of Tripura. The project underscores a strategic push to develop the region's digital economy and improve connectivity for local enterprises and government services. The foundation stone for the facility was laid on January 29, 2026, in a ceremony attended by Tripura's Chief Minister, Dr. Manik Saha. The data center, with a planned capacity of 5 megawatts (MW), represents an investment of approximately Rs 2 billion (USD 22 million). Upon completion, the site in Chanmari, near the state capital Agartala, is reported to span 80,000 square feet (7,432 square meters). While specific timelines for the build-out remain undisclosed, the development marks a notable entry into a region that has historically lacked major data center investments. Most of India's critical digital infrastructure is concentrated around cities like New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Chennai, leaving the northeastern states—including Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura—as underserved markets. The new facility is poised to support Airtel's growing cloud services portfolio, Airtel Cloud, which offers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. The telco recently partnered with IBM to augment this offering. By establishing local data processing capabilities, the center aims to reduce latency, enhance data sovereignty for clients in the region, and potentially serve as a digital gateway to neighboring Bangladesh, with which Tripura shares a border. Industry analysts view this investment as a bellwether for further digital infrastructure development in India's northeast, driven by increasing data consumption, government digitalization initiatives, and the need for robust edge computing nodes to support next-generation services. Source: datacenterdynamics
