Bharti Enterprises Founder and Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said Airtel aims to increase its data center capacity to 1 GW by 2030 from around 250–260 MW currently, as it looks to shift nearly half its portfolio towards new businesses over the next five years.
Bharti Enterprises Founder and Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal has identified AI data centers, sovereign cloud and financial services as the three major areas where the group plans to make fresh investments, saying the market is not recognising the potential of financial services in the way Airtel does.
In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Mittal said Airtel already has around 50 large customers for its sovereign cloud services and expects to expand its presence in the segment. The company is also building a large AI data center in Visakhapatnam for Google, with further projects planned in Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Kolkata.
Mittal said Airtel is targeting data centre capacity of 1 GW by 2030, compared with approximately 250–260 MW at present. The expansion will require investments of a few billion dollars. The company has secured another $1 billion in funding from Carlyle, Anchorage and Alphabet, but will need to bring in additional capital as it scales up the business.
On the ownership structure, Mittal said Airtel would seek to retain a majority stake in the data center business. Funding could come from existing shareholders or new investors, as the company continues to receive interest from potential backers.
He said the three new business areas would significantly change the composition of Airtel’s portfolio over the next five years. While connectivity currently accounts for around 80–90% of the business, Mittal expects new bets to contribute nearly half of the portfolio, with the remaining share coming from the core connectivity business.
Explaining the shift in Airtel’s business model, Mittal said the company had moved from selling minutes to selling data in gigabytes and would eventually sell tokens as demand for computing and artificial intelligence grows.
He said enterprise customers increasingly require computing capacity, data centers and sovereign cloud services, and Airtel wants to provide these offerings alongside its connectivity services rather than having customers seek them elsewhere. Building its own data centers and cloud infrastructure would also help the company prepare for the growing demand for computing resources and GPUs.
On financial services, Mittal said he and Gopal Vittal were particularly optimistic about the opportunity. He cited Airtel’s customer data and the attributes available through its customer base as advantages in offering consumer loans to a market of around 400 million people in India. The success of Airtel Money in Africa has also strengthened the group’s confidence in expanding financial services.
Mittal described Airtel Payments Bank as a business with significant potential. It has nearly 100 million customers and is approaching ₹4,000 crore in revenue. He said the bank could potentially reach ₹10,000 crore in deposits, ₹10,000 crore in revenue and ₹1,000 crore in profit by 2030. The group is in discussions with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and sees a potential window to list the payments bank in the next three to four years.
Mittal added that the group would continue to build its core connectivity business while expanding into these new areas. He said the aim was to make Airtel a significantly different company within five years, with a larger presence in data centers , sovereign cloud and financial services.
Watch accompanying video for full conversation.
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Sunil Mittal names AI data centers, sovereign cloud and financial services as Airtel’s big bets