RKD Construction Private Limited received Odisha’s approval on 23 September 2026 for a ₹1,500 crore data centre in Cuttack district, with 220 jobs claimed. It was one of four data centre and AI projects approved that day, and the smallest by a factor of nine. No capacity has been published. The state’s own project list, however, carries one descriptive detail that changes how the project should be read: it calls it a regional edge data processing facility, not a data centre campus.
1At a glance
2The one descriptive detail that matters
Every other record in this registry describes what is being built. This one, in the state’s own project list, describes what kind of thing it is: a regional edge data processing facility.
| Regional edge facility | Data centre campus | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical capacity | Under 5 MW, often 1 to 3 MW | 20 MW and above |
| Design intent | Getting compute close to users, low latency | Scale and efficiency |
| Redundancy | Often N or N+1 | N+1, 2N or better |
| Building | A floor or a single-storey hall | Multi-storey, often phased over years |
| At ₹1,500 crore | Implausible — far too much money | Plausible for a mid-sized first phase |
That creates a genuine puzzle rather than a resolution. ₹1,500 crore is too much for a small edge site and the right order of magnitude for a mid-sized data centre. The state’s description points one way and the money points the other.
One reading reconciles them: the ₹1,500 crore covers a portfolio of several edge sites in the district or region rather than one building, and the clearance is for the programme. That is common with edge deployments, which are uneconomic one at a time. No party has said so.
3What ₹1,500 crore could be
The comparison worth keeping is the one across the four approvals that day. The other three were ₹1,04,550 crore, ₹22,634 crore and ₹14,257 crore. This one was ₹1,500 crore, which is less than one and a half per cent of the total cleared in the meeting and about seven per cent of the smallest of the other three.
That is not a comment on the project’s merit. It is a comment on how the market reads approvals. Four data centre approvals in one state on one day, presented as a single number, are dominated entirely by one proposal — and the small ones, which are the ones that actually get built quickly, disappear in the reporting.
A ₹1,500 crore state approval with no capacity, no site and no operator explanation is a very early stage project.
But small projects are the ones that commission. A single ₹1,500 crore facility is far more likely to be energised within three years than a 1 GW park, and the registry needs the small ones for exactly that reason.
4Timeline
- The Odisha high-level clearance authority, at its 46th meeting, approves RKD Construction Private Limited’s ₹1,500 crore data centre in Cuttack district with 220 jobs claimed. It is the smallest of four data centre and AI approvals worth ₹1,42,941 crore that day.
- Trade and state coverage repeats the value and the jobs figure. The state project list carries the description regional edge data processing facility. No capacity appears in any report
- No capacity, site, land allotment, power sanction, design, contractor or schedule has been published
5What we refuse to invent
6Limits and open questions
7Sources
This record was compiled entirely from publicly available sources, cross-checked against one another.
Government of Odisha clearance·Business Standard·Economic Times Datacenters·Times of India·Kalinga TV·Voice & Data·Odisha TV·Outsource Accelerator
Gridvik does not publish source URLs on record pages; citations are retained in the internal source register and are available on request.
A short record of a small approval with no capacity attached. It is published as short deliberately, because the public record contains almost nothing else.
Corrections are free and published with a date.