Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, e-commerce, digital governance and streaming services — India’s digital economy is racing. But even as the nation positions itself as a global digital infrastructure hub, its technological backbone, the data centres, might begin to sweat, quite literally, from extreme heat.
Mango orchards and coconut stalls are no longer the lush, green and tropical reality of Indian summers — they are turning brutal. Heatwaves nearing the 50°C mark are arriving earlier, lingering longer and striking harder with each passing year.
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In 2024 alone, India recorded 554 heatwave days across different regions — more than double the 230 reported in 2023, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said in Parliament on December 4, that year.
The summer of 2025 offered little respite. Heatwave conditions set in unusually early, parts of Rajasthan neared 48°C, more than 30 weather stations crossed 43°C in April alone, and the IMD warned of an “above-normal number of heatwave days” across large parts of the country.
And for India’s rapidly expanding data centre ecosystem, an industry built on uninterrupted cooling, it is troubling news.
The concern is stark: every additional degree of heat outside a data centre forces cooling systems to work harder inside. That means higher electricity consumption, rising water demand and mounting operational costs.
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Industry experts now warn that India’s trillion-dollar digital ambitions may increasingly collide with the physical realities of this warming climate.
According to a Press Information Bureau release from March, India’s data centre capacity has already expanded more than 1,500 MW by 2025, and is projected to touch nearly 6.5 GW by 2030.
At the same time, climate researchers are warning that much of this infrastructure is being built in regions already vulnerable to severe heat stress.
“More than half of India’s existing data centres already experience temperatures above 35°C for over 90 days a year, and projections suggest that by 2040, nearly 90% could face such conditions,” said Dr Vishwas Chitale, Fellow at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water.
The hidden cost of heat
Data centres are essentially giant warehouses filled with servers that must operate continuously without overheating. The systems themselves generate enormous heat even under normal conditions.
A perfectly efficient data centre would have all electricity going directly toward computing. But in reality, a large portion of electricity is consumed by cooling systems, backup infrastructure and power management.
Extreme heat can tip this out of balance.
When outside temperatures rise dramatically, maintaining stable internal conditions becomes far more difficult — cooling systems must run longer and at higher intensities.
Dr Chitale warned that “cooling systems in data centres will need to work harder and longer, increasing electricity demand, operational costs, and dependence on water-intensive cooling technologies.”
He added that this becomes particularly concerning for India because “many facilities are concentrated in already heat-stressed and water-stressed urban regions.”
Currently, the country’s major data centre hubs — Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru and Noida — are located in densely populated urban regions already facing rising temperatures, stressed electricity grids and growing water scarcity.
Shailesh Tyagi, Partner and Sustainability & Climate Leader at Deloitte South Asia, said that global estimates suggest “extreme heat, drought, and related climate hazards could significantly increase operating costs for data centres over the coming decades.”
He added that “cooling and thermal management are increasingly becoming central to infrastructure planning and investment discussions.”
Meanwhile, the scale of future energy demand could be enormous.
India’s AI push is expected to significantly increase computing workloads in the coming years, particularly through hyperscale facilities and GPU-intensive AI training infrastructure. Such systems generate far more heat than conventional cloud storage operations, further intensifying cooling requirements, noted a Deloitte report from 2024.
A Council on Energy, Environment and Water report on India’s data centre infrastructure and resource use has highlighted how digital infrastructure growth is becoming deeply linked to questions of power and water sustainability.
Tyagi, meanwhile, said the current financing ecosystem still largely treats cooling “as a capital expenditure requirement rather than climate resilience as a long-term operational risk.”
That distinction matters.
Investors may currently be funding cooling systems as part of basic infrastructure costs. But as climate conditions worsen, the industry may increasingly need to rethink the economics of where and how digital infrastructure gets built.
