PUN 1 at Kharadi is listed by Nxtra by Airtel at 4.5 MW of IT power across 1,250 racks — 3.6 kW a rack, PUE below 1.55. Two of those numbers are worth more than the rest: 4.5 MW and 1,250 racks are exactly the figures on a Noida building 1,400 kilometres away. Same capacity, same cabinet count, same density. That is not coincidence — it is a standard building the operator repeats in different cities, and knowing it exists is worth more than either card on its own.
1At a glance
2The card that appears twice
The Pune page publishes four cards. Read them next to the operator’s Noida page and one of them repeats.
| Card | City | MW | Racks | kW a rack | PUE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PUN 1 | Pune, Kharadi | 4.5 | 1,250 | 3.6 | below 1.55 |
| NCR 1 | Noida | 4.5 | 1,250 | 3.6 | below 1.55 |
| PUN 3 | Pune, Hinjewadi | 4 | 1,000 | 4.0 | below 1.55 |
| PUN 2 | Pune, Hinjewadi | 17 | 4,000 | 4.25 | below 1.55 |
| PUN 4 | Pune, Hinjewadi | 24 | 2,500 | 9.6 | below 1.55 |
Two buildings in two states, one at 4.5 MW across 1,250 racks and the other at 4.5 MW across 1,250 racks. The likeliest explanation is not that the numbers were copied — it is that the company designs a repeatable building to a standard size and drops it wherever a market needs one. That is how a colocation operator scales, and it is why the same round numbers keep surfacing across the estate.
It matters commercially because it tells a vendor what to expect next. A 4.5 MW, 1,250-rack shell has a known bill of materials: a fixed cooling capacity, a fixed switchgear package, a fixed UPS count. Anyone selling into Nxtra can size an opportunity off the specification rather than off the site visit. It also tells a buyer of this intelligence that these cards are design standards, not measurements.
4.5 MW and 1,250 racks appears in Pune and in Noida. Where the operator builds its next mid-size hall, expect the same pair.
The counter-example is PUN 4 at 9.6 kW a rack — a different product for a different tenant.
3Kharadi and what the directories say
Kharadi is Pune’s eastern corridor: the original enterprise data centre address in the city, close to the airport and to the offices that buy from it. It is also where the public record disagrees with itself.
| Source type | What it says |
|---|---|
| The operator’s card | 4.5 MW of IT power, 1,250 racks, PUE below 1.55 |
| Directory listings | 3 MW of total power at MIDC Knowledge Park, Kharadi |
| A second directory | 4.8 MW total power, 51,921 m² gross building, 2,915 m² of colocation space |
| A third directory | 3 MW, 270,000 sq ft, PUE 1.50, maximum rack density 30 kW, air and liquid cooling, N+1 |
Three of those four give a different power figure, and every one gives a different floor area. None is necessarily wrong: a card may quote IT load, a directory may quote total facility power, and a third may quote a nameplate capacity that includes a generator. Gridvik records the operator’s card because it is the only number the owner of the building puts its name to, and notes the spread because it is wide enough to change a valuation.
The 30 kW maximum rack density claim deserves a sentence of its own. If a cabinet in this building can take 30 kW, and 1,250 cabinets share 4.5 MW, then the average cabinet is loaded at 3.6 kW — one eighth of the ceiling. A maximum and an average are two different things, and the gap between them is the commercial space in which a liquid cooling vendor either does or does not have a customer.
4Pune, the second largest cluster
Add all four Pune cards and the cluster is 49.5 MW across 8,750 racks — larger than Chennai at 46 MW and larger than Bengaluru at 45.4 MW.
| Cluster | MW | Racks | kW a rack |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mumbai | 71 | 6,900 | 10.3 |
| Pune | 49.5 | 8,750 | 5.7 |
| Chennai | 46 | about 5,400 stated for one building | 5.0 |
| Bengaluru | 45.4 | 9,800 | 4.6 |
| Delhi NCR | 38.5 | 8,050 | 4.8 |
| Total, five clusters | 250.4 | — | — |
That last row is the finding. The operator’s own homepage reports 230+ MW of total power capacity across 66 cities and 120-plus edge sites. Five large clusters alone add to 250.4 MW before a single edge site is counted, which is more than the headline itself.
The national number is therefore not a sum of the cards — it is a rounded headline that has drifted behind the facility page. Gridvik uses the cards for cluster arithmetic and the headline for nothing. When a company raises a billion dollars on the strength of a capacity number, the difference between a card sum and a slogan is not an academic point.
5Timeline
- Nxtra signs a memorandum with the Maharashtra industrial development corporation for new campuses in Mumbai and Pune
- A $673 million expansion programme describes a Pune campus of 21 MW of IT power across 2,200 racks, operating
- The Kharadi building is developed in the eastern corridor and listed as PUN 1
- The operator lists PUN 1 at 4.5 MW across 1,250 racks with a declared PUE below 1.55
- No commissioning date, current load or tenant name for this building in the public record
6Procurement
7Limits and open questions
8Sources
Sources: Nxtra Pune data centre page, Nxtra by Airtel site, PeeringDB facility register, DataCenterMap, DataCenterHawk, DataCenter Dynamics Infra on the Nxtra expansion programme, Airtel investor releases.