CtrlS Chennai DC 2 is 27 MW of IT load — and that phrase is the point. It is one of only three CtrlS records in this registry that states whether the megawatts are IT or gross. It sits with DC 1 inside a 72 MW, two-building campus built for ₹4,000 crore, which puts DC 1 at 45 MW by subtraction. The campus is live and expanding. It also contributes zero megawatts to the Tamil Nadu total, because every building in it is flagged as already inside the campus aggregate. That is the cleanest data in the Chennai file attached to the least visible number in it.
1At a glance
2The only CtrlS card that names its basis
Most Indian operators publish a megawatt number and leave the reader to guess what it measures. CtrlS does that on its Mumbai and Hyderabad cards. On Chennai and Noida it does not.
| Site | Figure | Basis stated | Comparable? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chennai DC park | 72 MW | IT load | yes — this is the clean one |
| Chennai DC 2 | 27 MW | IT load | yes |
| Noida | 8 MW | IT load | yes — see PRJ-106 |
| Bengaluru | 13 MW | IT load in the field, not explicit on the page | yes, with a caveat — see PRJ-107 |
| Mumbai, DC 1 to DC 5 | 118.8 MW | power capacity, unlabelled | no |
| Hyderabad, DC 1 to DC 3 | 26.4 MW | power capacity, unlabelled | no |
| Chandanvelly park | 700 MW | not stated | no |
| Future City campus | 750 MW | not stated | no |
Three of eight sites are stated in the same unit. That means a comparison between CtrlS Chennai and CtrlS Mumbai is not a like-for-like comparison, and nobody publishing an India density table has accounted for it.
IT load is the number a tenant cares about, because it is the power their racks can actually draw. Gross facility load includes cooling and losses and is always larger. If the Mumbai 118.8 MW is gross facility load at a PUE of 1.4, its IT load is nearer 85 MW — which would make Chennai the denser campus per rack even though Mumbai publishes the bigger number.
Chennai at 27 MW of IT load for one building, against a Mumbai building at 12.5 MW of unlabelled power capacity, is not a fair density comparison — and it is the comparison every market report makes.
Stated basis is worth more than a bigger number. This is the page in the CtrlS set where the operator did the reader’s work, and it is the only one.
3DC 1 by subtraction
The campus total and this building’s figure are both published. The rest follows, and the result is a building nobody has ever written about.
| Building | IT load | Basis of the figure | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| DC 1 | 45 MW | by subtraction | operational from Q2 2024 |
| DC 2 | 27 MW | published | stage unverified per building |
| Campus | 72 MW | published | live and expanding |
A 45 MW first building is larger than every Mumbai building except DC 4, and larger than anything CtrlS has built in Hyderabad. It has no page of its own, no density published, and no rack count. It exists in public only as the remainder of a subtraction.
That is a useful reminder about operator pages: the building that gets written about is the one being marketed, not the one carrying the load. DC 1 has been selling capacity since mid-2024 and is very likely the fuller of the two.
4Why a live 72 MW campus counts nothing
Tamil Nadu has 296.6 MW of counted data centre capacity in this registry. The CtrlS Chennai park is not in that number.
| Level | Record | Capacity | Counted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Campus | CtrlS Chennai DC park | 72 MW | no |
| Building | DC 2 | 27 MW | no — inside the campus |
| Building | DC 1 | 45 MW implied | no — inside the campus |
| Result | a live, expanding, ₹4,000 crore campus | 72 MW | 0 MW |
This is not a data error. It is a rule — do not add a child building to a parent aggregate — hitting a parent that was itself flagged as non-additive, which in practice means the campus is invisible at state level. The rule protects against double counting and produces under-counting instead.
The same defect runs through CtrlS Mumbai (118.8 MW, zero counted) and CtrlS Kolkata (16 MW, zero counted). Between them, roughly 207 MW of published, partly-operating CtrlS capacity contributes nothing to the 2,420.4 MW registry total.
5Procurement
6Limits and open questions
- No rack count. IT load is published but no cabinet count, so density per rack cannot be computed.
- No PUE. Tamil Nadu’s climate makes this the most important missing figure on the page.
- DC 1 is inferred. The 45 MW is a subtraction, not a published figure, and is labelled as such.
- Commissioning date missing for DC 2 — only DC 1 has one (Q2 2024).
- The ₹50,000 crore indirect investment claim in the original announcement is not a data centre figure and is not used anywhere in this record.
- What would close it. A rack count and a PUE for either building.
7Sources
Sources: CtrlS Chennai data centre pages, W.Media coverage of the CtrlS Chennai park announcement, Times of India on the ₹4,000 crore Chennai investment, CtrlS corporate site, and Indian market commentary on Chennai data centre supply.