On 15 February 2021 the Hiranandani Group announced it would buy a 100-acre site from Hindustan Motors at Uttarpara in Hooghly district, west of Kolkata, and build six Yotta hyperscale data centres totalling 250 MW for about ₹8,500 crore. The first building was to be ready in 2023. Five years and eight months later, no construction has been evidenced, no megawatt has been delivered, and the project's own leadership has twice described the capacity as 180 MW and 160 MW. This record is short because the public record is short.
1At a glance
2The promise
The announcement was large and precise, which is what makes it worth tracking.
The structure is the same one Yotta used in Greater Noida: a large land parcel bought from a state government or a distressed industrial owner, a state memorandum, a multi-building plan and a headline megawatt number. In Greater Noida that structure produced a live building in 20 months. In Bengal it has produced nothing in five years and eight months.
3The capacity that shrank
| Source | Date | Figure | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Announcement coverage | 15 Feb 2021 | 250 MW | Six buildings, ₹8,500 crore |
| Project leadership, press briefing | 1 Dec 2022 | 180 MW | Described as "30,000 racks with an IT load of 180 MW" on the 20-acre data centre portion |
| Second official, same period | Dec 2022 | about 160 MW | Capacity "could be around 160 MW", commissioned by 2025 |
| Current reference listings | Oct 2026 | 250 MW, planned | The original figure, still carried, with the project still at planning stage |
The December 2022 briefing is the most useful document on this project. It gave a rack count and an IT-load figure for the first time — 30,000 racks, 180 MW — and reduced the site from 100 acres to 20 acres for the data centre portion. It also admitted the project had been "moving slowly" and explained why: the design was being changed to a maximum of ground plus two floors instead of a multi-storey building, expressly to speed delivery.
Floors are a load problem. Height is a structural, cooling and vertical-transport problem. A G+2 design is faster to build and cheaper per megawatt, and it is what you switch to when you are behind.
It also admits the multi-storey plan was wrong for the site. Four years after that admission, the G+2 building has not been built either.
4Five years, nothing built
The evidence of absence is as strong as this kind of record can be made. As of October 2026:
Gridvik records this project as announced because that is what it is. It is not recorded as cancelled, because nothing has said so. It is recorded as a live claim that has produced no evidence for four years — which is the most accurate thing that can be said about it.
5Why Bengal was left behind
West Bengal offered a genuine policy case. Its data centre policy, notified in September 2021, provides 100% exemption on stamp duty and registration fees and a five-year electricity duty waiver. On a ₹8,500 crore project that is not a trivial concession.
What Bengal did not have was Yotta's attention. Between 2022 and 2026 the group committed to:
| Project | Committed | Status now |
|---|---|---|
| Greater Noida park, Uttar Pradesh | ₹39,000 crore memorandum | One of six buildings live, 28.8 MW |
| Navi Mumbai campus | 600 acres, described as scalable to 2 GW | Operating; the group's GPU centre of gravity |
| Guwahati | Announced for 2024 | Delivered later than stated |
| Blackwell Ultra GPU deployment | more than $2 billion | Under construction, target slipped |
| Uttarpara, West Bengal | ₹8,500 crore | Nothing built |
The competitive picture makes it harder. Eastern India's data-centre build has concentrated in New Town and the Bengal Silicon Valley hub, where Reliance Jio with Microsoft, Bharti Airtel, Adani and LTIMindtree are all building on state-provided land. Uttarpara sits roughly 30 kilometres north of that cluster, on a former car plant, without the anchor-tenant gravity the New Town hub has acquired.
West Bengal is the project that Yotta's pivot to AI compute made irrelevant. A company racing to get 60 MW of liquid-cooled GPU halls live in Greater Noida does not start a G+2 colocation park in Hooghly.
The useful signal is not that the project is dead. It is that announced capacity in India has an expiring value. A 250 MW announcement from 2021 that has built nothing should be treated as zero — and most market summaries still count it.
6Timeline
- Hiranandani Group signs a memorandum with the Government of West Bengal for an integrated logistics and data centre park at Uttarpara. 100 acres from Hindustan Motors. ₹8,500 crore direct investment; about ₹10,000 crore including associates. Six Yotta buildings, 250 MW. First data centre targeted for 2023.
- First Greenbase logistics facility targeted for completion.
- West Bengal data centre policy notified: full stamp duty and registration exemption, five-year electricity duty waiver.
- Project leadership states the Bengal project has been "moving slowly", that the design is being changed to a maximum of ground plus two floors to speed rollout, and that the data centre portion is 20 acres with 30,000 racks and an IT load of 180 MW. Capacity that week is also described as about 160 MW, commissioned by 2025.
- No construction milestone, contractor award, state approval, tenant or revised date is published. Every subsequent group announcement concerns other sites.
- Still at planning stage. Zero megawatts delivered. Five years and eight months after the announcement.
- Any evidence that the land transaction completed, any construction start, any revised schedule
7Assumptions and what we refuse to invent
8Limits and open questions
9Sources
This record was compiled entirely from publicly available sources, cross-checked against one another.
DatacenterDynamics·Business Standard·Economic Times·The Hindu BusinessLine·NDTV Profit·Telegraph India·Times of India (PTI)·West Bengal government listings·Data Center Map
Gridvik does not publish source URLs on record pages; citations are retained in the internal source register and are available on request.
This is a short record of a large announcement that has produced nothing visible in five years and eight months. It is published as short deliberately, because padding it would require inventing things.
Corrections are free and published with a date.