What happened: Wood Mackenzie projects rapid growth in data centre capacity and electricity demand for AI-led workloads
Wood Mackenzie estimates India’s operational data centre capacity will rise to 12 GW by 2030 from 2.2 GW in 2025. The estimate links this scale-up to AI adoption, hyperscale cloud investment, and the expansion of India’s digital economy.
Wood Mackenzie also projects that data centre capacity devoted to AI workloads will grow faster than overall capacity, and that electricity demand from data centres will expand sharply over the long run.
Forecast numbers highlighted by Wood Mackenzie include: Operational data centre capacity: 2.2 GW (2025) to 12 GW (2030).AI-dedicated data centre capacity: 275 MW (2025) to 6,546 MW (2030).Data centre electricity demand: 10 TWh (2025) to 191 TWh (2040).
Background and earlier position: data centre load is concentrated in a few states
Wood Mackenzie reports that Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu account for about 65% of installed IT load at present. Installed IT load refers to the electricity demand of the IT equipment (servers, storage, and networking) inside data centres, excluding some auxiliary power uses.
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