How Digital Connexion Is Redefining India’s Digital Backbone

India’s digital economy is sprinting ahead, driven by AI, cloud, and the rapidly expanding edge computing. Leading the transformation are data centers driving innovation, resilience, and scale for hyperscalers and digital-first companies.

Digital Connexion, the three-way joint venture between Brookfield, Reliance Industries, and Digital Realty, is leading this transformation by developing AI-readied campuses as well as an investment strategy centred around customers. During this interview, Mr C. R. Srinivasan, CEO, Digital Connexion, discusses how the organisation is aligning its technology roadmap with India’s digital vision by leveraging AI-driven infrastructure, strong governance, and sustainable growth.

1. As a leader bridging business and technology, how do you align Digital Connexion’s IT investments with the evolving digital needs of enterprises and hyperscalers in India?

At Digital Connexion, we constantly engage with our customers and prospects to understand their digital priorities. We also embed market scanning into our strategy, partnering with analysts and technology research firms. For example, our data centers are purpose-built for AI, like our Chennai facility is NVIDIA-DGX ready and supports GPU Intensive workloads for hyperscalers. The Chennai facility being an AI campus is power dense, with power density per rack going up to 150 kW, and the whole campus offers over 100 MW of power, all in line with what hyperscalers need. The Chennai campus is network rich and is within proximity to major cable landing stations, offering a solid digital foundation to our hyperscale customers. For enterprises we offer a range of colocation services beginning from a single cabinet to caged space to dedicated floors to BTS (Build-To-Suit) services. 

Our alignment isn’t static – it is measured by customer NPS, capacity uptake and utilization and a constant evaluation of emerging AI technology trends. In essence, our investments are customer-led bets on India’s digital vision: resilient, scalable and future-proof digital infrastructure. Our investments are the foundation for the next wave of AI led innovation in India that will position India as a global powerhouse for AI. 

2. What leadership qualities do you believe are essential for driving innovation and resilience in the fast-paced data center and digital infrastructure sector?

In the high-stakes, rapidly evolving sector of digital infrastructure, effective leadership hinges on a powerful combination: a deep technological understanding, proven experience in building digital infrastructure, and a strategic grasp of the services layer. This foundation must translate into a clear, executable vision backed by relentless delivery.

3. How do you ensure agility and scalability in your technology roadmap while maintaining operational reliability and security?

Agility and reliability go hand in hand in our approach. We design our infrastructure with modular architecture that enables customers to scale seamlessly, from initial deployments to multi-megawatt environments, without disruption. This flexibility allows enterprises to adapt to evolving technology trends, whether driven by AI, cloud, or high-density workloads. 

Equally important is our focus on operational excellence and resilience. We integrate globally benchmarked processes, fault-tolerant system design, and advanced security controls into every layer of our infrastructure. This ensures that as customer needs evolve and workloads scale, performance and reliability remain uncompromised, giving enterprises the confidence to innovate and grow securely at speed and scale.

4. In your view, what emerging technologies (beyond AI and cloud) will shape the next decade of digital infrastructure growth?

Beyond AI and cloud, we see technologies like edge computing and quantum computing playing a defining role in shaping the next phase of digital infrastructure. The rapid growth of edge will demand highly distributed, low-latency environments capable of supporting real-time applications, while high-performance computing will significantly increase power and cooling requirements. At Digital Connexion, we have designed our facilities to be flexible, scalable, and future-ready, enabling customers to adopt these technologies seamlessly as they mature. Our goal is to ensure that the infrastructure we build today becomes the foundation for the next decade of innovation.

5. How do you foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation across technical and business teams at Digital Connexion?

At Digital Connexion, we believe continuous learning and innovation are key to staying ahead in a rapidly evolving industry. We encourage close collaboration between technical and business teams, create opportunities to learn from new technologies and global best practices, and foster an environment where new ideas are explored and shared. This approach helps our teams stay agile, build new capabilities, and deliver solutions that meet evolving customer needs.

6. With growing regulatory and compliance demands, how do you balance innovation with governance, particularly around data privacy and cybersecurity?

Governance is integral to how we approach infrastructure design and operations. As regulatory and compliance requirements evolve, we focus on creating an environment where innovation and compliance go hand in hand. Our facilities are built to meet globally recognised standards, including FM Global, IEEE, IEC, ASHRAE TC 9.9 and ISI, and are certified for SOC 2, SOC 3, PCI-DSS and ISO 27001. These certifications ensure our infrastructure meets stringent audit, privacy, and data management requirements, giving enterprises the confidence to scale their digital initiatives securely and in line with regulatory expectations. 

By embedding compliance into our design principles and operational frameworks, we enable customers to innovate, deploy new technologies, and expand their digital capabilities without compromising on governance.

7. What strategic advice would you give CIOs in traditional industries looking to build future-ready digital ecosystems with partners like Digital Connexion?

For CIOs in traditional sectors, building a future-ready digital ecosystem starts with aligning infrastructure decisions to long-term business goals. As these traditional industries adopt digital technologies, they create an infrastructure footprint that generates a lot of data. This would mean they plan proactively to create infrastructure that is scalable, networked, compliant and sustainable. All of these four characteristics are extremely key to creating infrastructure that can cope with the evolving needs of cloud, AI, edge and other technologies. It will be ideal for such industries to partner with a forward-looking AI native service provider like Digital Connexion to co-create and future-proof their infrastructure strategy. 

8. How do you foresee the role of hybrid and edge computing evolving in India’s digital landscape, and what is Digital Connexion’s approach to these trends?

Hybrid and edge computing are set to become central to India’s digital landscape as enterprises increasingly process data closer to the source while maintaining seamless integration with centralised cloud infrastructure. This trend will require infrastructure that combines ultra-low latency, high interconnectivity, and scalability, attributes that are core to our design philosophy. 

At Digital Connexion, we are strategically offering a blend of high-quality data centers with a rich ecosystem of network connectivity to deliver on the performance enterprises need. Our modular architecture and carrier-dense, neutral interconnect ecosystems enable customers to deploy hybrid and edge strategies efficiently. This ensures that as their workloads become more distributed and latency-sensitive, their digital infrastructure remains agile, efficient, and ready for future growth.