source: techcrunch ai: canadian pension giant joins race to fund india’s ai-fueled data center boom
level: business
canada pension plan investment board’s cpp investments is putting up to ₹70 billion, about $741 million, into indian data center operator ctrls. the deal includes ₹40 billion for an 8.2% stake in ctrls and up to ₹30 billion for a joint venture to build hyperscale data center campuses. cpp investments will own 48% of the venture, with ctrls holding the rest.
ctrls, founded in 2007, runs more than 15 data centers in india and is expanding to meet demand from cloud providers and ai workloads. india is seeing a rush of data center investments from global tech firms like amazon, google, microsoft, openai, and uber. cpp investments, canada’s largest pension investor, has been active in india since 2009 and holds about $20 billion in net assets there.
the partnership aims to grow capacity for ai-specific infrastructure. other recent moves include blackstone-backed airtrunk planning $30 billion for five gigawatts of capacity by 2030, and meta partnering with reliance industries on a 168-megawatt ai data center. india offers tax exemptions for foreign cloud providers through 2047 to attract such projects. however, the country still relies on us firms for frontier ai models, and the data center buildout raises concerns about electricity and water use.
why it matters: this investment shows how global capital is flowing into ai infrastructure, with india becoming a key market for data center expansion, affecting cloud costs and ai service availability.
source: techcrunch ai: canadian pension giant joins race to fund india’s ai-fueled data center boom