NCR 1 at Sector 62, Noida, is listed by Nxtra by Airtel at 4.5 MW of IT power across 1,250 racks — 3.6 kW a rack. In a market where new Indian halls are specified at 11 kW a cabinet and where TCS has claimed 170 kW, that is a legacy building operating at a fraction of modern density. It is also, and this is the reason to record it carefully, the kind of building that still makes up most of India’s installed capacity.
1At a glance
23.6 kW a rack
Three and a half kilowatts a cabinet is a number from a different era of computing, and it is worth putting beside the modern figures to see how far the market has moved.
| Facility | kW a rack | What it can host |
|---|---|---|
| Nxtra NCR 1, Noida | 3.6 | single-socket enterprise servers, storage, network gear |
| Nxtra NCR 2, Noida | 2.3 | the lowest in the portfolio |
| Nxtra MUM 2, Airoli | 6.4 | dense cloud and enterprise colocation |
| Nxtra MUM 4, Mahape | 11.7 | accelerated computing with assisted cooling |
| TCS HyperVault, Hyderabad, claimed | above 170 | frontier AI training halls |
The spread between the top and bottom of that table is 47 times. Any market statement that describes "Indian data centre capacity" as a single number is averaging buildings that cannot be compared.
The commercial consequence for this specific building is straightforward. At 3.6 kW a cabinet it is well suited to what most Indian enterprises still buy: racks of servers, storage and network equipment for regulated and government-adjacent workloads, close to Delhi, with dual-path power. It is not a candidate for GPU tenancy and will not become one without a rebuild of its cooling and power distribution.
That is not a criticism. Buildings like this carry a large share of India’s enterprise IT, they are profitable, and they have long lives. They simply sit outside the part of the market that is growing fastest.
If a third of India’s installed capacity runs at 3 to 6 kW a cabinet, then any forecast of AI capacity built by dividing megawatts by a modern rack density will overstate the number of racks the country can serve.
The rack is no longer a unit of capacity. The megawatt is.
3Three sources, three capacities
This building is a good example of how Indian facility data diverges, because three separate listings describe it with three different numbers.
| Source | Capacity | Racks or area |
|---|---|---|
| Operator’s Noida page | 4.5 MW of IT power | 1,250 racks |
| Third-party directory | about 4.0 MW | about 1,200 racks, about 109,000 square feet |
| Broker capacity sheet | about 6.0 MW marketed | maximum 3 kW a cabinet, about 86,000 square feet |
The three figures can be partly reconciled and not fully. At the broker’s stated maximum of 3 kW a cabinet, 1,250 racks would carry 3.75 MW — close to the operator’s 4.5 MW design and below the 6 MW marketed number, which is consistent with a facility that sells power in blocks and markets more than any single rack can draw.
What cannot be reconciled is the floor area, which varies by 27% between two third-party sheets. That is the usual signature of one source counting usable white space and another counting the whole building.
Gridvik records the operator’s 4.5 MW across 1,250 racks because it is the only figure published by the party that owns the building, and notes the other two without adopting either.
4Timeline
- Sector 62 in Noida is established as one of the NCR’s data centre locations, close to the expressway and the Delhi border
- The operator’s Noida page lists NCR 1 at 4.5 MW of IT power and 1,250 racks, carrier neutral, with no commissioning status
- Airtel describes Nxtra’s platform growing from around 120–130 MW to 1 GW, with new AI campuses in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata rather than Noida
- No stage change, no date and no additional detail for this facility in the public record
5Procurement
6Limits and open questions
7Sources
Sources: Nxtra Noida data centre page, Nxtra by Airtel site, DataCenterMap Noida listings, Baxtel facility records, broker facility capacity sheets, Airtel FY26 annual report.