India’s data center industry is entering a decisive phase. For years, the conversation has largely been about capacity creation. How much can be built, how quickly, and where?
The policy direction of the Union Budget of India is shifting conversation meaningfully. It signals an intent to position the country not only as a large digital market, but as a global infrastructure base for cloud and artificial intelligence workloads.
At the center of this shift is a landmark proposal: a tax certainty framework extending to 2047 for foreign cloud service providers using Indian data centers to serve global customers.
In effect, India has transitioned from a demand-led market to a supply-led global compute base, where infrastructure is built not just for domestic consumption, but for exporting AI and cloud capacity. For the first time, countries will compete not just to host data, but to export compute, and that competition will be decided by power and not policy alone.
The 2047 vision: building a fiscal engine for global compute
