‘16GW job to power world’s largest planned data centre with renewables’
Reliance Industries and its owner Mukesh Ambani plan to build green-powered data centre far bigger than any currently in operation
Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries is planning to build a 3GW data centre that would, for a while at least, be the most power-hungry on Earth, according to reports last week.
For comparison, some of the current largest data centres on Earth consume around 150MW of power. That is the capacity of the China Telecom-Inner Mongolia Information Park, which was described as the world’s largest data centre in 2022.
One of the biggest new data centre projects – The Citadel in the US state of Nevada – is still only slated for 650MW of power consumption, while India’s entire current data centre capacity is estimated at around 1GW.
Reliance – India’s largest conglomerate, a juggernaut whose tendrils touch almost all spheres of life in the country, including retail, telecoms and energy – reportedly plans to power the data centre as much as possible with renewables.
But powering the data centre with clean electricity would require a vast renewables array.
Ashutosh Padelkar, research lead at Aurora Energy Research, said: “Powering a 3GW data centre, with the solar project in Gujarat and the wind project in Maharashtra, could involve a configuration such as a 10GW tracking solar PV system, 2GW of onshore wind, and a 4GW/6-hour battery.”
For reference, the UK’s entire solar power fleet last year stood at 17GW, less than double what could be needed to theoretically meet the power demands of one data centre.
The huge challenge of powering the site will be helped by the fact Jamnagar is also home to Reliance’s clean energy mega-complex, which includes five gigafactories for solar PV, fuel cell systems, green hydrogen, energy storage and power electronics.