India’s Digital Gateway: Mumbai Gears Up to Meet Growing AI Demand

India’s digital economy is growing rapidly, fueled both by innovative homegrown companies and multinationals invested in the country’s future. But it’s clear that the best is yet to come.

The same growth we’ve seen in recent years will continue to accelerate, and the country’s digital economy is well on its way to crossing the $1 trillion mark by 2030.[1] There are many different factors that will drive this growth:

• Demographics: About two-thirds of all Indians are under 35,[2] and these youths typically grew up using digital technology in every aspect of their lives.
• Widespread mobile adoption: About 85% of Indian households reported owning at least one smartphone.[3]
• Government support: The Indian government has pursued policy enablers for digital growth, including a proposed tax holiday for global cloud providers leveraging India-based data center infrastructure. Also, IndiaAI Mission sponsored the deployment of more than 34,000 GPUs and offers subsidized access to national compute capacity for AI startups.[4]
• Success of digital platforms: The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) facilitates more than 20 billion transactions every month, making it the global benchmark among digital payment platforms.[5]
• Geography: The country is centrally located along the digital corridor between Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Europe, and many subsea cables land in the country. New cables supported by large global providers, including Blue-Raman from Google and 2Africa Pearls from Meta, are bringing additional bandwidth.

These factors are spurring digital growth throughout India, but particularly in Mumbai. The city is already India’s hub for cloud service providers, cable landing stations, colocation service providers and internet exchanges. This dense ecosystem supports thriving local business sectors such as finance, commerce and entertainment.

We expect to see massive growth in digital infrastructure deployment to support the financial ecosystem in Mumbai, as banks and other financial institutions capitalize on hybrid multicloud and advanced AI use cases.

Why banks are pursuing hybrid multicloud deployment in Mumbai

Mumbai is home to key financial institutions like the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). It’s no surprise that a thriving ecosystem has formed here to service these leading institutions and others like them. For instance, many global hyperscalers have cloud regions in Mumbai, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.

Hybrid multicloud is a good fit for financial services because the industry is highly regulated, and institutions handle a lot of sensitive customer data. Putting that data into the public cloud may not be compatible with their regulatory requirements. Banks need private infrastructure to help meet sovereignty and privacy requirements such as India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) while also maintaining the trust of end customers.

A hybrid multicloud strategy gives financial institutions the flexibility of public cloud services for certain workloads, without placing underlaying datasets at risk. They can achieve this using cloud adjacency: deploying inside a vendor-neutral colocation data center with sub-millisecond latency cloud on-ramps from major hyperscalers. This allows them to move temporary copies of data into public cloud when the need arises, while maintaining custody and control over the authoritative datasets in their private colocation environment.

According to one recent survey, India is the global leader in multicloud connectivity tools, with 83% of enterprises reporting adoption of such tools. The survey also found that Indian enterprises use these tools to connect with 37 distinct cloud and SaaS providers on average. With companies here showing a strong preference for multicloud and the sophistication needed to adopt it quickly, it’s no surprise that global hyperscalers and colocation providers see India as a promising market, and that they’re investing accordingly.

Multicloud sets the stage for AI adoption

The race to adopt next-generation AI capabilities is reshaping industries. The financial services industry is no exception, but the path forward will require a deliberate and secure approach. Again, the need to protect data and meet regulatory requirements is part of what makes AI adoption so challenging for financial institutions.

Banks need distributed AI infrastructure to host the right AI workloads in the right places. For instance, AI training workloads may be a good fit for deployment in public cloud environments that offer scalable compute resources, but AI inference workloads are latency-sensitive and thus need to be deployed in proximity to data sources. Inference also requires connectivity with AI ecosystem partners, which enterprises can easily find inside interconnection hubs such as Equinix colocation data centers.

The fact that India is already a leader in hybrid multicloud adoption means that financial institutions here are well positioned to support distributed AI workloads. If they’ve got private infrastructure environments that store sensitive customer data, they may use that same private infrastructure to host inference workloads. If they’re deployed in certain locations for cloud adjacency, they can likely connect with AI ecosystem partners such as neoclouds in those same locations.

Since Mumbai is home to more than half of all data center capacity in India[6], many AI ecosystem partners are congregating here, and financial institutions can benefit from that fact.

Equinix supports Mumbai’s digital future

Equinix high-performance data centers are designed to support high-density workloads, providing instant access to AI infrastructure, edge-to-cloud connectivity and neutral partner ecosystems. We’ve helped more than 5,500 enterprises across nearly every business vertical meet their unique digital infrastructure challenges.

We’ve been offering our global expertise and experience to customers in India since 2021, and we’ve seen a lot of change during that time. Our data centers in Mumbai—Equinix MB1, MB2 and MB4—have played an influential role in enabling India’s hybrid multicloud adoption.

MB1 is home to some of the very first deployments that global hyperscalers ever made in the country. Before AWS had dedicated cloud regions in India, they had a network node in MB1, which connected to their region in Singapore.

Today, our Mumbai data centers host direct on-ramps to all major cloud providers. Using Equinix Fabric®, our virtual connectivity solution, enterprises can connect to multiple cloud providers using a single physical port. These low-latency connections are highly scalable and available via a pay-per-use model. This gives us a front-row view of how hybrid multicloud is taking shape in India.

Now, we’re proud to announce the next stage of our investment in Mumbai. Today marks the opening of MB3, our newest data center in Mumbai. The facility is built on nearly four acres of land in the heart of Mumbai, and provides 1,375 cabinets in its first phase. This makes MB3 one of the largest retail data centers in India. In future phases, we plan to add significantly more cabinets to support further enterprise growth.

With MB3, we aim to do for India’s financial ecosystem what we’ve already done for the cloud, content and network ecosystems. MB3 is designed and built to provide everything financial institutions need to scale quickly and unlock new capabilities, all while maintaining data privacy and sovereignty. This includes AI-ready data center capacity backed by advanced liquid cooling capabilities, on-demand access to ecosystem partners, and flexible connectivity solutions.

Equinix is also an established leader in data center sustainability initiatives. We recently commissioned a new captive solar plant in Yavatmal, which is designed to generate about 41.4 million kWh of clean energy annually. The MB3 facility, like at least 250 other Equinix data centers throughout the world, has 100% renewable energy coverage.

MB3 is a connectivity hub for Mumbai

Financial institutions in Mumbai will benefit from MB3 as a connectivity hub, both within India and to the wider world. MB3 will join MB1, MB2 and MB4 as part of a tightly integrated data center campus. All four facilities are located close to each other, and customers deployed in one of them can use Equinix Metro Connect® for easy access to ecosystem partners in the three others.

Mumbai is linked to our global data center portfolio via Equinix Fabric. This includes connectivity to our data center in Chennai for redundancy within India, and to our facilities in Singapore for companies looking to capitalize on burgeoning trade ties between India and Southeast Asia. Using Equinix Fabric, customers can easily scale connectivity on demand, instead of overpaying for bandwidth they don’t need yet.

MB3 and other Equinix data centers in Mumbai will be landing sites for several upcoming subsea cable systems. This means that Equinix customers can take advantage of new bandwidth from these cables with no data backhaul or additional costs.

The launch of MB3 will also help financial institutions and other enterprises access the distributed AI infrastructure they need to explore next-generation AI solutions. It will help Indian companies and multinationals in India build their AI-ready data networks to enable ecosystem access and faster inference.

Learn more about how you can unlock the power of distributed AI, in India and throughout the world. Read the brief: Optimize your global network for AI.

[1] Supriya Roy, India’s digital economy to cross $1 trillion by 2030: Bessemer Report, The Times of India, June 26, 2025.

[2] Aparna Pande, India’s demographic dividend: Potential or pitfall?, GIS Reports, May 21, 2025.

[3] Results of Comprehensive Modular Survey: Telecom, 2025, Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation, May 29, 2025.

[4] India’s Common Compute Capacity Crosses 34,000 GPUs, Ministry of Electronics and IT, May 30, 2025.

[5] UPI – The Global Benchmark for Digital Payments, Boston Consulting Group, October 8, 2025.

[6] Mumbai leads India’s Data Centre capacity with a 53% share YTD, CBRE, November 12, 2205.