Why data centres are becoming as strategically important as roads, power grids and telecom networks
By Leslie D’Monte
For decades, economic competitiveness rested on highways, ports, airports and telecom networks. Today, data centres have joined that list, not merely because they house servers but because they provide the computing power that increasingly determines how economies innovate, businesses compete and governments deliver services.
This marks a subtle but important shift. For years, India’s digital ambitions were defined by software exports, IT services and digital public infrastructure. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now expanding the definition of national infrastructure to include compute and the facilities that enable it.
Whether real or synthetic, structured or unstructured, data remains AI’s essential raw material. But data has little value without the computing infrastructure that transforms it into intelligence. Every stage of the AI lifecycle — from pre-training and post-training to inference, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and the emerging class of cache-augmented generation (CAG) — depends on modern data centres. According to...
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