Equinix CN1 — ChennaiEquinix India · SIPCOT IT Park, Siruseri, Tamil Nadu · 3.6 MW live

Equinix opened its first Chennai data centre on 19 September 2025, on nearly six acres of SIPCOT land at Siruseri, twenty-eight kilometres from the central business district and close to anticipated submarine cable landings. The press release gave 800 cabinets in phase one and 4,250 cabinets at full build. The company’s own executives said 850 and 4,950. What almost nobody printed is the number that makes the building legible: 3.6 MW of IT load live, rising to roughly 25 MW. Equinix, like most global colocation operators, sells cabinets. Convert them and the building becomes comparable with everything else in this market.

1At a glance

2The capacity the press release left out

This is the central observation of the record, and it is a general one about the sector. Equinix reports cabinets and investment. It does not report megawatts. The company is not being evasive — cabinets are the correct unit for what it sells, which is retail colocation space with interconnection attached to it. But it means the largest data centre company in the world is almost invisible in a market that counts megawatts.

3Four cabinet numbers

There is a mundane explanation, and it is the right one. Press releases are written months before the event and cleared through legal. The 800 was the committed handover count. By opening day the usable cabinet count was 850, and the longer-term master plan had been refined from 4,250 to 4,950 as the design developed.

Both numbers are honest. They are simply measuring two different stages of the same building’s life. Gridvik records 800 as built and carries the higher figures as plan.

4The figures that do reconcile

Here is the check worth doing on any facility whose operator publishes cabinets instead of megawatts.

Three different pairs of published numbers land within 1.4 kW per cabinet of each other. That consistency is not a coincidence: it is what happens when a real design exists behind the numbers. It also tells you what the building is. CN1 is a five kilowatt retail colocation facility, which is the mainstream of the Indian market and not an AI hall.

For comparison, Yotta’s D1 works out at 5.76 kW per rack and Avisirah’s new Navi Mumbai facility is specified at 5 kW. The three most differently positioned projects in the registry converge on the same density, because that is where Indian enterprise demand actually sits.

5What a megawatt costs in retail colocation

Retail colocation costs three times a hyperscale build per megawatt, and there are three honest reasons.

First, phase one pays for the whole shell. CN1’s 800 cabinets sit inside a four-storey building designed for 4,250 or more. If the full build cost scales proportionally, the implied cost per megawatt at 25 MW is a fraction of the phase-one figure.

Second, retail means small deployments. The engineering that lets forty customers share a hall costs more per megawatt than one tenant filling a building.

Third, and most important, the megawatt is not what is being sold. Equinix is selling interconnection — Equinix Fabric, direct connections to AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle, and access to five internet exchanges in India. That is the product, and it is priced per port and per cross-connect, not per kilowatt.

6The building and the site

The comparison worth making is with Sify’s Chennai 02 campus, which Gridvik recorded at 25.92 MW built and which contains an on-site open cable landing station. Chennai now has two operators of very different scale competing on the same premise: being the building nearest the cables.

7What AI-ready means here

"AI-ready" is on the cover of the press release. At 4.5 kilowatts per cabinet on day one, it is worth being precise about what the claim does and does not mean.

That is not a criticism of Equinix. Designing for liquid cooling before there is demand for it is the right call, and it is what separates a building that can be upgraded from one that cannot. The honest statement is that CN1 is AI-capable by design and colocation-dense by configuration.

The practical consequence for a buyer: if a customer wants 60 kW racks here, the conversation is about a specific hall fit-out, not about the building that opened in September 2025.

8Timeline

• June 2024
  Equinix announces a Chennai expansion with an initial investment of about $65 million and a total site capacity of 4,950 cabinets at full build-out.
• 19 September 2025
  CN1 opens, inaugurated by the Tamil Nadu chief minister. 800 cabinets and a 3.6 MW initial IT load in a four-storey building on nearly six acres at Siruseri. US$69 million initial investment. Full build described as 4,250 cabinets.
• September 2025
  Company executives state that the site will scale to more than 4,950 cabinets with an IT load of roughly 25 MW over four to five years, timed to customer demand.
• 8 April 2026
  Equinix opens MB3 in Mumbai, taking its cumulative India investment to $365 million across five buildings, and says it is in talks to acquire further Mumbai land.
• 22 October 2026
  CN1 is operating. No further phase has been announced. The remaining 3,450 to 4,150 cabinets and about 21 MW of design capacity are unbuilt and undated beyond a four to five year horizon

9Procurement

Rows with a lock are the paid layer.

10Assumptions and method

11Limits and open questions

12Sources

This record was compiled entirely from publicly available sources, cross-checked against one another.