00:00Great to be here. Big ambitions for India. How much potential is there? Some say that perhaps
00:04this data center boom could be in access of $100 billion. I think that's a fair statement. I think
00:12$100 billion will go in certainly before 2030. This year alone, this quarter, we've committed
00:21$4 billion to NVIDIA. We think that'll go to almost $10 or $11 billion before the end of this year.
00:28That's chips alone. And commensurate to that, about $2.5, $2 billion will go in the physical
00:33data center itself. So I think that's just one company, our company, into this. And we think
00:39with others coming in, $100 billion is going to come up pretty quick.
00:44Needless to say that data centers is one of the hottest investment themes out there, especially
00:50in India. What's hype? What's not? Actually, I think India's time has come
00:57from a perspective of two big ingredients. One is we are good at building data centers at
01:04a very efficient cost. And second is the Indian government had spent a lot of time and planning
01:10on power transmission. So we don't have the power issues that a lot of the other countries
01:15are facing. So I think these two big elements have sort of helped all of this come together.
01:21And of course, the talent force is there.
01:23Where are the gaps right now? And where do you see yourself filling that gap?
01:28I think we've successfully managed to pivot things in terms of everybody was looking at
01:36an Indian data center only for Indian capacities. Today, I'm proud to say that this year, Yoda,
01:42which is our data center platform, its book will be about 75% U.S. dollar giving AI cloud
01:50compute to global companies.
01:52You know, in terms of the challenges that India itself faces versus the likes of China
01:56and Vietnam, where do you think, you know, where are the gaps for that? How does India play
02:03a bigger role versus these countries?
02:06I think there are three, four elements to that. One is as far as, you know, and I can just
02:11tell you by example. I think today, we are not enough in the benefiting from the actual
02:19hardware, AI hardware ecosystem in that supply chain. I think we're working on it, but it's
02:26two early days. Where we will benefit is on the data center build ecosystem. So everything
02:31is sort of, you know, transformers, air conditioning units, all that is coming from India, which we
02:37are happy to see. The other bit which we've improvised and improved on is we've built the entire cloud
02:43layer. So the entire self-service deployment, which an AWS or a Google cloud does, Yoda does under
02:49Shakti Cloud. And we've developed it both for private enterprise, as well as we've created entire cloud
02:56compute platform, as well as token factories, entirely indigenously done, and developed it and we offer it at a
03:02far better cost offering than many of the global players do. So I think there are quite a few of
03:07the
03:08gaps that we've already filled. And I think the next piece, of course, will be in deploying some of
03:14these AI services to improve productivity and to improve the lives of Indians in general.
03:19Of course, the group is across a lot of sectors, including real estate. Now that you're looking at
03:24data centers, I'm just wondering how crucial that unit is going to be in terms of its contribution to
03:30your groups. I think data centers and especially with the boom AI scene is going to, for the next
03:40few years, dwarf everything else because of the kind of... For the group. For the group. Because, I mean,
03:47and if you think about it, you know, it's happened for all companies in the world. I mean, if you
03:53were
03:53a Microsoft or a Meta or a Google, your AI data center play has dwarfed everything else you've done
04:00till date. Same for us. And I think will be the same for anybody who's getting into this particular
04:08theme on the side of the cycle, where you're investing in the hard asset, bringing in compute,
04:13and delivering that. Certainly going to be the case for us as well.
04:17Darshan, you're the next leader in the company. If you were starting from scratch, given the current
04:22environment, what would you do differently? I think, you know, we've... The good part about
04:32our... At least my personal situation is that I was able to start a blank canvas for this,
04:38for all our new investments. So fortunately, Yotta was created with a blank canvas where I didn't have
04:45a lot of the overhang. And I'm proud to say we've got world-class talent that's actually managed to make
04:50this happen. And we've kept our eye on, hey, these are the bits we can actually do well,
04:54and we've brought it into the system.
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