India, April 10 -- India's data centre story is getting bigger, but also more layered. Artificial intelligence (AI) has added fresh momentum to the sector while raising tougher questions around scale, power, sustainability, and how real this demand actually is.

In this conversation with Dataquest, Sharad Agarwal, CEO of Sify's Data Center Business, shares a grounded perspective on what is hype, what is structural, and what it takes to build infrastructure that is genuinely future-ready.

The real question is around how much of the demand is sustainable versus overstated. Today, India is roughly at 1.5-1.6 gigawatts (GW) of operational data centre capacity, which has grown at around 28% CAGR since COVID-19, driven by cloud adoption and di...