Quality Power says data centre opportunities worth around $100 million are currently being bid for, but delivery timelines of nearly 12 months are making it difficult for the company to take on more orders
India’s rapidly expanding data centre industry is creating a new opportunity for power equipment manufacturers, but Quality Power Electrical Equipments Ltd is pointing to a less discussed constraint: the ability to deliver the specialised electrical equipment needed by data centres quickly enough.
During its Q1 FY27 earnings conference call on August 10, Quality Power management said it was seeing data centre related opportunities worth around $100 million, but the company was struggling to take on some of these orders because delivery periods are stretching to about 12 months.
Asked about the company’s order pipeline and capacity expansion, Joint Managing Director Bharanidharan Pandyan said: “There are about half a dozen STATCOM projects across US, Europe, Australia that we are in talks with. We have got a couple of STATCOMs already in the US. Apart from it, the data center opportunities are typically the, where we are seeing the $100 million bids going on. That we are still struggling because the delivery periods are about 12 months’ time.”
The comment offers a glimpse into a potential bottleneck developing underneath India’s data centre expansion. While operators and technology companies are racing to add computing capacity to support artificial intelligence and cloud demand, the infrastructure required to supply reliable power to these facilities has to expand alongside them.
Quality Power itself described data centre power infrastructure as one of the key demand drivers across its portfolio. CEO Sanjog Mhatre said the company’s demand environment was being supported by “transmission expansion, renewable integration, HVDC and FACTS deployment, grid modernisation, energy storage and data center power infrastructure.”
Orders are not the problem
Perhaps the more interesting part of the call was management’s assertion that demand is not currently the constraint. Capacity and execution are.
Quality Power ended June with a consolidated order book of Rs 1,945 crore, equivalent to around 1.9 times its previous year’s revenue. The company said its individual factories were already operating with close to two years of order visibility.
Pandyan told analysts: “Once, I believe in about three months’ time, into the next quarter, when we are slightly comfortable once we have taken over the new facility and we have stabilized it. Believe me, this facility, if you come over, it’s quite large. It takes you, it takes you about 600 meters from one corner to another corner walking around.”
He then made the demand situation particularly clear: “So, once we are able to stable, we will take in more orders. Getting orders is not a worry at this moment for us.”
More importantly, he said: “Each of the factories is sitting on more than two years of order book almost at this moment, close to two years of order book and at the last capacities.”
That suggests the data centre opportunity is emerging at a time when power equipment manufacturers themselves are already running with substantial order visibility.
Why data centres need more than electricity
Data centres are among the most power intensive forms of digital infrastructure. But supplying electricity to them is not simply about securing a connection to the grid. Operators need specialised equipment to manage voltage, power quality, reliability and the conversion and distribution of electricity inside increasingly large facilities.
This is where Quality Power’s portfolio becomes relevant.
The company operates across high voltage equipment, power quality technologies and power electronics. Its management said its business is benefiting from transmission expansion, renewable integration, HVDC, FACTS, energy storage and data centre power infrastructure.
The company’s order book stood at Rs 1,945 crore at the end of June, with Endoks contributing Rs 801 crore, Mehru Rs 585 crore and Quality Power standalone Rs 553 crore.
The bottleneck may extend beyond data centres
Interestingly, the same Q1 call highlighted another potential constraint in the power infrastructure supply chain: insulators. Quality Power recently moved to acquire Winwin Speciality Insulators, and management said the rationale was not simply backward integration.
Pandyan said: “Whether it is data centers or high voltage, low voltage, whatever we are in the business, insulators is something that we cannot live without. Let’s say, if you go to any substation, the first thing you see is a brown porcelain.”
He added that the company was already finding demand for insulators internally, which was slowing its growth.
“But also across board, every large multinational which is guiding for growth is getting stuck because of this.”
According to Pandyan, there are only around four or five significant insulator manufacturers in India and perhaps another eight or nine globally. He said: “Nobody is expanding, no new vendor is coming in, which means as the way we see the grids operate, the demand-supply mismatch of insulators are going to be even more extreme.”
For a data centre industry that requires increasingly sophisticated power infrastructure, such supply constraints could become important.
Quality Power is investing ahead of demand
The company is responding by adding manufacturing capacity even before the existing opportunity has fully played out.
Management said its strategy was to “invest ahead of demand”, while the new Sangli facility is being commissioned and Endoks is preparing its power conversion systems facility in Turkey.
At the same time, the company is expanding its power electronics capabilities. Asked about the growth trajectory of its businesses, Pandyan said: “I think the highest growth will come from power electronics sector because of the BESS coming in. The second growth area would be the high voltage power products.”
For Quality Power, therefore, the data centre opportunity sits inside a much larger investment cycle spanning grids, renewable energy, energy storage, HVDC and power electronics.
But the $100 million data centre opportunity highlighted on the Q1 call offers an important signal for India’s digital infrastructure story.
The country may be able to announce hundreds of megawatts of new data centre capacity. The harder question could increasingly be whether the electrical equipment industry can build and deliver the infrastructure required to power it on time.
And Quality Power’s message from its Q1 call is clear: the demand is already there. The challenge is delivering the equipment fast enough.
