CHE 1 at 101 Santhome High Road is listed by Nxtra by Airtel at 2 MW of IT power — the smallest of the operator’s four Chennai facilities and about 4% of its 46 MW city portfolio. It is also the most strategically placed building in the portfolio. Santhome is where Chennai’s submarine cables come ashore, and this address hosts the largest internet exchange presence in the city, with 26 members and about 892 Gb/s of provisioned capacity. In this record the megawatts are almost irrelevant and the address is everything.
1At a glance
2Two megawatts at the cable landing point
Santhome is a beach on the Chennai coast where international cables come ashore. That single fact gives a 2 MW building a value that does not appear on its facility card.
| Item | Position |
|---|---|
| Prime position | Santhome is the landing area for submarine cables reaching Chennai, including the MIST system which was cleared to land at Santhome beach |
| Airtel’s own cable | Airtel completed the landing of SEA-ME-WE-6 in Chennai in February 2025 — a 21,700 route kilometre system bringing about 220 Tb/s of capacity to India — and stated that it would be integrated with Nxtra’s Chennai facilities |
| Internet exchange presence | Exchange listings place Bharti Airtel Santhome as the largest PoP in Chennai with 26 members, 33 ports and about 892 Gb/s of provisioned capacity. The two Nxtra Siruseri PoPs listed carry 2 and 3 members respectively |
| What that means | This building is where networks meet. Capacity there is measured in cross-connects, not megawatts |
| Who it serves | Carriers, ISPs, content networks and enterprises whose latency to international destinations is a commercial requirement |
That explains why the smallest building in the portfolio still exists. A 27 MW hall in Siruseri cannot be reached from the beach; a 2 MW site on the beach can hand traffic straight to a cable. Chennai’s position as India’s east coast cable hub — with multiple systems landing there and hundreds of terabits of aggregate capacity — is the reason this address has value and the reason Nxtra’s Chennai page leads with connectivity rather than with load.
For a supplier the conclusion is blunt: this is not a site that buys cooling or switchgear. It buys routers, cross-connects, optical equipment, redundancy and physical security, and it buys them at a premium because nothing here can be allowed to fail.
The registry is full of gigawatt announcements that will never get a cable landing. This is 2 MW at the place where the cables actually are.
Interconnect is the part of Indian data centre value that no megawatt count captures.
3What the directories call this building
The same address appears in third-party directories under a different name and a different capacity, and the discrepancy is worth recording because directories propagate into market sizing.
| Source | Name | Capacity |
|---|---|---|
| Nxtra’s own Chennai page | CHE 1 | 2 MW, no rack count |
| Third-party directory listings | Chennai III, Santhome | about 1.5 MW, about 250 racks |
| Exchange listing | Bharti Airtel Santhome | no capacity stated; 26 members, 892 Gb/s |
| Gridvik record | CHE 1 | operator figure retained; directory figure retained as a note |
Two things go wrong in that table. First, the name: third-party directories call this "Chennai III" because it was Nxtra’s third Chennai facility chronologically, while the operator’s current scheme calls it CHE 1. That naming clash is a live source of error in the market, because a directory search for "Nxtra Chennai III" returns the Santhome site, and a reader may reasonably conclude that CHE 3 is at Santhome when it is at Siruseri.
Second, the capacity: 2 MW on the operator’s card against 1.5 MW in a directory. Neither is stated as live load, and the difference is inside the range that usually reflects design versus installed capacity.
Gridvik keeps the operator’s figure for the record and publishes the conflict rather than resolving it. Where an operator and a directory disagree, the operator wins on identity and the disagreement is the data.
4Timeline
- The Santhome site operates as one of Nxtra’s earliest Chennai data centres and as an Airtel interconnect point in the city
- The MIST cable system receives coastal regulation zone clearance to land at Santhome beach in Chennai
- Airtel completes the landing of SEA-ME-WE-6 in Chennai, about 220 Tb/s, to be integrated with Nxtra’s Chennai facilities
- CHE 1 appears on the operator’s Chennai page with a 2 MW IT power card and no commissioning date
- No stage change and no additional detail in the public record
5Limits and open questions
6Sources
Sources: Nxtra Chennai data centre page, Nxtra by Airtel site, Extreme IX Chennai point-of-presence listing, Airtel SEA-ME-WE-6 landing release, SubTel Forum on the MIST landing, DataCenterMap Chennai listings, Airtel FY26 annual report.