The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, known as CPP Investments, has announced an investment of up to 70 billion Indian rupees (approximately $741 million) in CtrlS, an Indian data center operator. The deal marks another milestone in the global race to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure, with India positioning itself as a strategic hub for cloud and AI workloads.
Under the agreement announced today, CPP Investments will acquire an 8.2% stake in CtrlS for 40 billion rupees ($423 million) and commit up to 30 billion rupees ($317 million) to a joint venture to develop hyperscale data center campuses across India. The joint venture will be 48% owned by the Canadian fund and 52% by CtrlS.
A Strategic Partner for Digital India
CtrlS, founded in 2007 and headquartered in Hyderabad, operates more than 15 data centers across the country. The company is expanding capacity to meet rising demand from cloud providers, enterprises, and AI workloads. India has become a prime destination for data center and AI investments, with giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Uber announcing recent expansion plans. Local operators are accelerating buildouts to keep pace with surging computing demand.
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Max Biagosch, global head of real assets at CPP Investments, stated: "India, as one of the fastest-growing digital markets in the world, represents an important pillar of our global data center strategy." The Canadian fund has been investing in India since 2009 and as of March 31 held net assets of about $20 billion in the country, making it one of the largest foreign institutional investors.
The partnership fits into CPP Investments' broader push into digital infrastructure, where it has been active since 2017 with a portfolio of assets and joint ventures across major global markets. Sridhar Pinnapureddy, founder and CEO of CtrlS, emphasized that the partnership will help expand capacity and build infrastructure tailored for AI workloads.
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India's AI Gold Rush
The CPP-CtrlS deal is the latest in a string of investments targeting India's data center sector. Earlier this month, Blackstone-backed AirTrunk announced a $30 billion investment to build five gigawatts of capacity by 2030. Meta partnered with Reliance Industries on a 168-megawatt AI-enabled data center in Gujarat. Indian conglomerates such as Adani Group and Tata Consultancy Services have also unveiled major projects to support AI and cloud workloads.
The Indian government has implemented measures to attract investment, including tax exemptions for foreign cloud providers on services sold overseas until 2047, provided workloads run from data centers located in the country. Despite rapid infrastructure growth, the development of indigenous AI models lags behind: startups like Sarvam are working on this, but most AI technology used by Indian companies continues to be supplied by U.S. firms.
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The massive data center buildout could strain the country's water and electricity resources, raising sustainability concerns. For more on the energy challenges of data centers, read our article Flexible Data Centers: AI Helps the Power Grid Manage Demand Spikes.
For a technical guide on monitoring and optimizing IT infrastructure, check Monitoring and Observability: The Definitive Pillar Guide for Production Applications and Infrastructure. For global context, visit Wikipedia's page on data centers.
