India is building data centres at a remarkable pace, and the debate is about megawatts, water, coal and clearances. Those costs are real, but the deeper question is what all this computing power will serve. Much of the demand comes from our own restlessness, the wish for one more distraction or achievement, which digital businesses have learned to profit from. Before we celebrate how intelligent our machines have become, can we look honestly at who is giving them orders?
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Originally published in Times Now on 31 October '26
India is announcing data centres on a scale that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. Every announcement arrives with impressive figures: thousands of crores, hundreds of megawatts, promises of jobs and a place in the global AI race.
The machines themselves keep getting bigger and more capable. In all the celebration, hardly anyone asks who will be setting these machines to work, or what they will be asked to do. If a confused person gets hold of a vastly more powerful instrument, does the instrument make him any wiser, or does his confusion simply acquire more power?
According to the government, India’s installed data-centre capacity went from about 375 megawatts in 2020 to 1.57 gigawatts by August 2026. A study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water projects 4.5 to 6.5 gigawatts by 2030. Those are projections and not finished facilities, but the scale of what is being planned is clear enough. India does need computing infrastructure, for medicine, research, education and public services, and there is no virtue in being technologically weak. A megawatt, though, only measures electrical capacity; it says nothing about the worth of the work that electricity will be consumed for. We calculate very diligently what the machines can do, and hardly look at the one who wants them to do it, or why.
