AirTrunk pledges $30B for 5GW of AI data centers in India by 2030

AirTrunk, the Blackstone-backed Australian data center operator, will spend $30 billion building 5 gigawatts of capacity in India by 2030. The anchor project is a 3GW campus at Maharashtra's Raigad Pen Growth Center, worth roughly $21 billion, announced via X by chief minister Devendra Fadnavis. Another 600MW is in the pipeline across Mumbai, Chennai, and Hyderabad. AirTrunk entered India earlier this year by buying Lumina CloudInfra.

For context, India's total data center capacity today is about 1.5GW. Projections put it at 8GW by 2030, and AirTrunk alone is now pledging five of those gigawatts. The country has been priced in to most AI-infrastructure forecasts as a long-tail market; this signals it is moving into the same tier as the US and Europe for new builds. CEO Robin Khuda met Prime Minister Narendra Modi to mark the announcement, and a 2026 Indian policy gives tax exemption through 2047 on overseas cloud workloads, an explicit incentive for foreign operators.

The catch is the same one stalking every gigawatt-scale plan: power, water, and land. The announcement does not explain where the electricity for 5GW will come from on the timeline. Read this as a commitment, not yet capacity.

Why it matters

If you run inference workloads or plan global data residency, India is about to become a real region rather than an afterthought. Watch which operator wins the first 1GW online; the timing will reset assumptions about where it is cheapest to serve South and Southeast Asian users.