This report examines India’s data center boom and the policy posture that has accelerated it. Over the last six months, the country has secured investment commitments worth over $300 billion from foreign and domestic firms, with nearly $100 billion of that pledged by US-based hyperscalers alone. The figure is unprecedented for a single industrial sector over such a short period, but the narrative around these commitments has run well ahead of what the underlying economics actually deliver.

The report does three things. It maps the market and policy drivers of the boom, including domestic demand, the GCC ecosystem, infrastructure status for data centers above 5 MW, a twenty-year tax holiday for foreign hyperscalers exporting their services, state-level incentive packages, and a dense maze of data localization rules. It then conducts a cost-benefit analysis that questions the dominant claims of technological sovereignty and broad economic gain. Finally, it argues that India must shift from investment facilitation to negotiated extraction, and lays out the concrete templates the government can put on the table: compute for academia, applied R&D testbeds, regional tech clusters, AI-based public service delivery, and a structured renewables and storage push.