Tulip sets up Rs 900-cr data centre

Bangalore: Enterprise data services company Tulip Telecom has established a 9 lakh sq ft data centre ‘Tulip Data City' here, the world's third largest data centre, at a total investment of Rs 900 crore.

“The company has made an immediate investment of Rs 230 crore and has secured loans for Rs 50 crore from leading banks,” Lt Col H.S. Bedi, Chairman and Managing Director of Tulip Telecom, said. The company is planning to raise another Rs 250 crore through debt, Rs 250 crore through equity and will fund the rest using internal accruals, he added.

“We might also look at strategic partners for the business,” he added. With more companies moving to professional data centres for their storage needs, the telecom company expects the entire facility to be occupied in three years.

Rs 600-cr orders
Tulip Data City, the 100 per cent subsidiary data centre of Tulip Telecom, currently has orders worth Rs 600 crore from IBM, NTT and HP.

“About 20 per cent of the data centre has already been booked by three customers and we expect it to be fully contracted in three years,” Lt Col Bedi said. Tulip Data City expects to earn revenues of Rs 1,000 crore once the data centre is fully operational.

The facility was inaugurated by Mr Sachin Pilot, Minister of State for Communications and IT. “The future will be decided based on who owns the data, and currently, a large part of our data is owned outside India… so it is extremely important to have a data centre here,” Mr Pilot said after the inauguration.

Tulip Data City is Tulip Telecom's fifth data centre and Lt Col Bedi said that once this centre takes off, the company could consider bringing other data centres under this. The servers at Tulip Data City consume about 100 MW of power in peak but it is still lower than where the servers were earlier used where they consumer about 130 MW power, Lt Col Bedi said.

The company draws 20 MW from the Bangalore Electricity and Supply and Company and is planning to source the remaining power from other entities, he said.