New Delhi, Sept. 27 -- India's aspiration to become a data centre hub is underpinned by a simple economic reality. Few countries generate data at India's scale. Fewer still combine that scale with a large domestic market, growing cloud adoption, a huge talent pool and an increasingly important role in AI-driven services. Yet, India's share of global data centre capacity remains modest.

Data generation and data centre investment do not necessarily converge. Nations that generate vast quantities of data would appear to be natural locations for the digital infrastructure that stores, processes and derives value from that data. Yet, data availability alone is rarely sufficient to attract large-scale investment.

The differentiating factor is...