Reliance Industries Limited Will Invest in Brookfield Infra, the Data Centre Joint Venture of Digital Realty

Reliance Industries (RIL) has entered into an agreement to invest alongside Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty in their Indian platform designed for the development of data centres across India.

With this new alliance, Reliance Industries will possess a 33,33 percent stake in the existing joint venture between Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty, BAM Digital Realty, and become an equal partner.

The joint venture will now be known as 'Digital Connexion: A Brookfield, Jio, and Digital Realty Company,' according to a filing with the SEC. Through this partnership, Reliance Industries will invest 378 billion rupees in five Indian wholly-owned subsidiaries of Mercury Holdings SG, a joint venture between Brookfield Infrastructure and Digital Realty.

RIL has also committed to invest additional amounts in equity and debt securities of the Indian SPVs and any other new SPVs that may be established by Mercury India SG FDI, up to a total of 622 crore, as and when requests are made, the company said. "The partnership will enable us to provide our enterprise and SMB clients with cutting-edge, plug-and-play solutions delivered from the cloud, as well as lead their digital transformation and make them more competitive and efficient," said Kiran Thomas, CEO of Jio Platforms.

The joint venture will be positioned to serve global and local enterprises, small and medium businesses, and India's entrepreneurs for their cloud and colocation needs as they migrate compute resources to the cloud and off-premise.

We are delighted to expand our existing partnership with Reliance and add their extensive knowledge of the Indian telecom, technology, and data landscape to our platform.

Brookfield's MD and director of infrastructure for India and the Middle East, Arpit Agrawal, stated that data centres provide essential services and critical infrastructure to support the ongoing digitalisation of all aspects of life in India. The platform is in the process of constructing a data centre in Mumbai and Chennai, two important locations. By the end of 2023, its first 20 MW greenfield data centre on a 100 MW campus in Chennai is anticipated to be completed. The alliance recently announced the purchase of 2.15 acres of land in Mumbai for the construction of a 40 MW data centre.

The transaction is contingent on regulatory approvals and is anticipated to be finalised soon.