Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is likely to collaborate with Sify Technologies to establish a 500-megawatt data centre in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, The Economic Times reported on Friday.
Sify plans to invest about Rs 15,266 crore to construct the hyperscale facility in Paradesipalem village, around 25 km from Visakhapatnam city along the Kolkata-Srikakulam highway.
The entire capacity will be leased to Meta. As part of the collaboration, Meta will also land its ambitious subsea cable project—'Waterworth'—at Sify's landing station in the region.
A data centre houses rows of racks equipped with graphics processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs), which can be procured or leased from manufacturers such as Nvidia.
"Meta will be the end user. Other details about investment in racks and processing units are being worked out," according to the ET report
Both Meta and Sify have not commented anything on the reported development.
This initiative marks the first time the Menlo Park-based social media giant will lease large-scale data infrastructure in India, aiming to utilise the country's massive AI services market and its ongoing 'Superintelligence' strategy.
In an earlier report, ET had said Meta's multibillion-dollar undersea cable system would be anchored on the shores of Mumbai and Visakhapatnam.
Spanning over 50,000 km, Waterworth will become the world's longest subsea cable network, connecting the US, India, Brazil, and South Africa. The project is expected to enhance international bandwidth and reduce latency significantly.
Sify and Google are the first to join hands with the Andhra Pradesh government's ambitious plan to create a 6-gigawatt data centre ecosystem.
While Google is developing a 1-GW data centre cluster, the government has allocated 550 MW to Sify.
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