The country’s surging mobile data consumption and the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence are expected to trigger the next wave of investments in the country’s data centre industry. Despite generating one of the world’s largest volumes of mobile data, India accounts for only about 2% of global data centre capacity, highlighting a significant infrastructure gap.
According to ICICI Securities, India generates more than 20% of the world’s mobile data while hosting merely around 2% of global data centre capacity. The brokerage believes this structural mismatch will require substantial investments in local data hosting infrastructure over the coming years.
The report notes that the country has around 13.9% of the world’s mobile subscribers and generates nearly 30 exabytes of mobile data every month. In CY25, the country had about 430 million 5G subscribers, accounting for nearly 35% of the market. As consumers migrate from 4G to 5G, 5G penetration is expected to rise to 81%, or around 1.1 billion users, by 2031.
Higher network speeds are also driving a sharp increase in data consumption. Average monthly usage per smartphone has already reached 37 GB and is projected to almost double to 70 GB by 2031. As a result, India’s monthly mobile data generation is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15% to reach 68 exabytes between CY25 and CY31.
Beyond higher consumption, the nature of internet traffic is also changing. Short form videos, live game streaming and AI powered image and video generation applications are significantly increasing uplink traffic, where users upload data rather than simply consume it.
“Heavy uplink traffic requires immense computational processing and immediate storage,” ICICI Securities said, adding that data centres will have to expand their high performance computing infrastructure to instantly process, compress and store the enormous volumes of data being uploaded from smartphones every minute.
The brokerage believes these trends, combined with India’s relatively low share in global data centre capacity, create a compelling long term opportunity for data centre developers and digital infrastructure investors.
