Nikhil Kamath leads Rs 250 cr investment in CtrlS

Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath and Kofluence co-founder Sreeram Reddy Vanga have invested Rs 250 crore in data centre operator CtrlS, as demand for computing infrastructure rises with the adoption of artificial intelligence and cloud services.

Kamath invested Rs 200 crore, while Vanga put in Rs 50 crore.

The Hyderabad-based company said the capital will be used to expand its infrastructure and add capacity to meet demand from enterprises and large cloud-service providers. Data centres house the servers and networking equipment used to run digital services, while hyperscale facilities are built to handle particularly large computing workloads.

“Every meaningful technology shift of the next decade, AI, cloud and digital public infrastructure, runs on data centres,” Kamath said. “India is at an inflection point where the underlying infrastructure either keeps pace or becomes the bottleneck.”

Founded by Sridhar Pinnapureddy in 2007, CtrlS operates 19 data centres across nine Indian markets. It has more than 370 megawatts of capacity and projects totalling 4.4 gigawatts at various stages of execution, according to the company. Power capacity is a key measure of a data centre’s ability to operate servers and computing equipment.

Vanga said India’s AI and cloud ambitions would require digital infrastructure at scale. “I am excited to be part of CtrlS’s next phase of growth and the broader digital infrastructure opportunity in India,” he said.

Pinnapureddy said the new investors shared the company’s long-term view of India’s infrastructure requirements. “It gives us the ability to think bigger, move faster, and continue building data centre platforms that will support India’s next phase of growth,” he said.

Source: The Times of India