India's $60 billion data-center bet, and the jobs it won't actually create

**Mrunmayee Kulkarni** (0:05)
Imagine the last part of Terminator Judgment Day, where he's in an empty building with a lot of computers. That's a data center.
It's a very cold building, it's very silent. No desks or no chairs here, just racks of servers. You don't really have a lot of windows, so it's dark all the time. It's under a really harsh glare of LED lights. At one corner, I could just hear water just sort of moving through different pipes. And everywhere you look, there is this little hum.
The kind of hum you have in hotel rooms, basically. When it's all closed up, the windows don't open and the AC hums at a very weird angle.

**Rahel Philipose** (0:43)
You just heard my colleague, The Ken reporter Mrunmayee Kulkarni. And here, she is talking about her experience from inside a data center. The infrastructure that powers the artificial intelligence capacity of LLMs that you and I both use, like ChargPT, Claude and Gemini.
And as you heard, a data center isn't exactly the most welcoming of places. My colleague, Inderpal Singh, who worked on this story with Mrunmayee, in fact describes it as a space that is resentful of human presence.
But it's still the kind of facility that almost every Indian state is rushing to build. So much so, that some are nearly emptying out their purses to build out these structures. India itself is targeting 10 gigawatts of this capacity by 2030, up from about 1.57 gigawatts today. That's the race that these states are currently locked in. Gujarat announced its data center policy last month, quoting about 6 lakh crore rupees in investment. Meanwhile, Andhra Pradesh has managed to bring in reliance and Google by offering more than 40,000 crore rupees in incentives. And that's at the stage where the state is already in a revenue deficit. But what exactly are they even buying? Mostly the promise of jobs. And to be fair, the promise does look shiny. Government officials have talked about nearly 100,000 new engineering jobs by 2030, created by data centers. But that kind of sounds like a pretty loaded promise, right? Especially for what is mostly an empty building? That's the question that prompted my colleagues to take a closer look at the numbers, and see what exactly each of these promised jobs would actually cost the state. In this episode, you will hear from both of them. Because turns out, the math isn't really in the state's favor.
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Rachel Varghese, and every day of the week, my co-host, Snigdha Sharma, and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Friday, the 21st of August.
The data center is built for AI as we know it today, look like the set of Terminator by design. The safety and security of all of these sensitive pieces of data traveling from server to server, pretty much demand this kind of a deserted condition. Here's Inderpal explaining why in more detail.

**Inderpal Singh** (3:35)
A modern data center is, I think, a very lonely place, perhaps the loneliest of all.
Because there's a lot of risk involved here, because this is somebody's data and you can't risk breaching it. And every extra person in a data center facility means extra breach risk that you have.
And a fun fact I came across during my reporting was that, a lot of data centers in India at least are hiring retired army officers for security. So that should tell us about how secure these places need to be. And that's why one of the people I interviewed for the story, Vimal Kaur. He's the CEO of the largest data center company in India. So he told me that he also doesn't have access to a lot of his own data centers in India.

**Rahel Philipose** (4:23)
Imagine, Kaur runs 18 data centers in India. And even then, he and the other people who are in charge of security, who are already on the data center's payroll, are rarely allowed inside.
That seems to drastically reduce the number of jobs a data center opens up, right? So I asked Inderpal, what exactly is the pitch that companies are making to the states?

**Inderpal Singh** (4:49)
So a lot of these pitches, which Mrunmayee talked about, are packaged with the promise of jobs.
Recently, one of the union ministers said that the data center sector in India would create one lakh engineering jobs. Data center jobs are different from traditional jobs. I mean, it's a little apples to oranges comparison here, but I mean, it takes a lot of investment per job in data centers, compared to something like, say, textiles or something like mobile manufacturing or software.