What is data centre construction equipment?
Data centre construction equipment is the ordinary heavy plant that builds a data centre’s foundations, its shell and the buried routes that bring power in, long before the first server arrives. Nothing on the site is exotic. What sets the job apart is load: the floors carry rows of heavy racks, cooling plant and back-up power, and high-voltage cables and fibre have to reach the building underground.
The work falls into three stages. Each one runs on machines that also work on any large building site.
| Stage |
What happens on site |
Machines that do it |
| Earthwork |
The plot is cleared and levelled, the basement and foundations are dug, and fill is compacted under the slabs and the yard |
Excavators, backhoe loaders, soil compactors |
| Concrete and structure |
Foundations, floor slabs and walls are cast, and steel is unloaded and moved around the site |
Transit mixers, stationary concrete pumps, pick and carry cranes |
| Power and services |
Trenches for power cables and ducts are dug and backfilled, and cable trays, ducting and panels are lifted to height |
Backhoe loaders, small excavators, telehandlers |
How a stationary pump pushes concrete into a slab through a pipeline is explained in the guide to concrete pumps, and the lifting jobs a telehandler takes over from a crane are set out in telehandler applications.
The heaviest single lifts on the job are the diesel generator sets, the transformers and the chillers. Those are usually made with crawler, truck or tower cranes. Tower cranes, crawler cranes, boom lifts and forklifts all work on these sites. They are named here so the picture is complete. They are not machine classes listed on this page.
Where is data centre construction concentrated in India?
Data centres cluster in a handful of metro regions, and the machines follow them. In a written reply to the Lok Sabha in March 2026, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology gave this split of operational capacity, citing industry sources (Press Information Bureau, 18 March 2026):
| City |
State |
Operational capacity |
| Mumbai and Navi Mumbai |
Maharashtra |
790 MW |
| Chennai |
Tamil Nadu |
305 MW |
| Bengaluru |
Karnataka |
182 MW |
| Hyderabad |
Telangana |
152 MW |
| Delhi-NCR and Noida |
Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh |
76 MW |
| Pune and Kolkata, together |
Maharashtra and West Bengal |
15 MW |
Capacity is counted in megawatts of power, not in floor area. That is how the industry sizes a data centre.
The same reply listed four submarine cable systems being commissioned. All four land at Mumbai, and one of them lands at Chennai as well.
By August 2026 the ministry put installed capacity at about 1,575 MW, against 375 MW in 2020. It named Gujarat among the states that already host data centres, and Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal as the states where the industry is now expanding (Press Information Bureau, 6 August 2026).
Who are the main data centre companies in India?
The companies that commission data centres in India are mostly specialist developers and operators, many of them backed by telecom groups or global investors. The ones below publish where they build. The list is alphabetical, not a ranking, and each line describes the work the company itself says it carries out.
| Company |
What it builds or runs |
| CtrlS |
Operates Rated-4 data centres, with sites in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Noida, Bengaluru and Kolkata |
| Equinix |
Runs colocation data centres in Mumbai and Chennai |
| Nxtra |
A data centre company backed by Bharti Airtel and the Carlyle Group, with a network of data centres across India |
| Princeton Digital Group |
Develops hyperscale data centre campuses, including one at Airoli in Navi Mumbai and others in the northern Chennai area and in Hyderabad |
| RackBank |
Builds AI data centres cooled by immersion, including an AI data centre park at Raipur in Chhattisgarh |
| Sify Technologies |
Runs data centres in Mumbai, Chennai, Noida, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kolkata |
| Web Werks |
Runs data centres in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad |
| Yotta |
Runs the NM1 campus in Mumbai, D1 at Greater Noida and G1 at GIFT City in Gujarat |
The civil contractors who build these campuses for them are the large EPC firms, and our list of EPC companies in India covers who they are.