Sify’s Vashi facility went live in September 2000 and was the first commercial data centre in India. Twenty-six years later it publishes 0.38 MW of live IT power across 375 racks — about 1 kilowatt a rack, in a market where a new AI hall advertises 130. The same building is published at 0.9 MW on the current portfolio card and 1.2 MW fully built out. At 0.38 MW it is 0.05% of Maharashtra’s 786.4 MW counted capacity and 0.016% of the national 2,420.4 MW. This page is short because the building is small. That is the finding: the oldest site in the registry is now a rounding error, and it is still running.
1At a glance
2Three figures for one 375-rack building
| Figure | Source and date | MW | What it measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fully built out | Older Vashi page, DataCenterMap | 1.2 | Total installed capacity of the halls, whether energised or not |
| Portfolio card | 2025 report, older card | 0.9 | Designed IT power, the number used in the operator’s own literature |
| Live power | Current card, Sep 2026 | 0.38 | Power actually drawn by tenant load today |
| This registry | — | 0.38 | Live figure counted; 1.2 MW published beside it |
The three figures are internally consistent, which is worth stating clearly because it is rare in this file. A building can be 1.2 MW built, 0.9 MW designed for sale and 0.38 MW actually running. The first is plant, the second is product, the third is revenue.
The real news is the number itself. Two thirds of the built capacity is dark. On 375 racks and 1.2 MW, occupancy expressed as power is roughly 32%. No operator publishes load for a facility this old, so 32% is arithmetic on the operator’s own two numbers, not a disclosure.
Every capacity figure in Indian data centre reporting is a forward number. Announced, designed, planned, under construction. Vashi is the only site in this registry where the gap between built and live has been visible for two decades, and the gap is two thirds.
That is the base rate any investor should carry into a 100 MW announcement. A campus that opens at a third of its built power is not a failure — it is what a mature, fully-depreciated asset looks like when the demand has moved to a different city.
Vashi sits in Navi Mumbai, the densest capacity node in the country. Its tenants have not left because the rent is wrong. They have left because the racks cannot take the power.
3One kilowatt per rack, and what that costs
0.38 MW across 375 racks is 1,013 watts a rack. A single modern GPU server draws seven to ten times that. On a per-square-foot basis the same building works out at about 37 W per sq ft of raised floor, against the 150 to 300 W per sq ft Sify’s own Rabale documentation quotes for new halls — a four- to eightfold difference in the same operator’s estate.
That is not a criticism of Vashi. It is the clearest available answer to a question every Indian data centre investor should ask: what does it cost to keep a legacy asset in service?
| Basis | MW | Value at ₹55.3 cr per MW |
|---|---|---|
| Live power today | 0.38 | ₹21 cr |
| Designed for sale | 0.9 | ₹50 cr |
| Fully built out | 1.2 | ₹66 cr |
| Same space rebuilt at Rabale density | 1.2 | ₹66 cr of plant, about 4,000 racks |
At the replacement-cost band this file has established — ₹51.4 to 60.1 crore per MW of IT across five independent operators — the land, shell and plant behind Vashi are worth roughly ₹21 crore at live power and ₹66 crore at built power. Both are estimates and both are labelled. Anybody buying or valuing this asset will use one of them.
The strategic reading is harsher and more useful: a 1 kW rack cannot be sold in 2026. Vashi survives on interconnection, on legacy applications that cannot move, and on the fact that it sits on the same fibre ring as Rabale. Those are real assets. They are not capacity assets, and they should not be valued as capacity.
India’s first commercial data centre is 0.016% of the national counted capacity, runs at one kilowatt a rack, and has been operational for twenty-six years without interruption.
That is simultaneously the best reliability record in this file and the smallest number in it. Sify proved it could run a data centre in India in 2000. The remaining 2,420 MW is a different business entirely.
4Procurement
5Limits and open questions
- Three published capacities — 0.38, 0.9 and 1.2 MW. The registry counts 0.38 MW, the live figure, the only conservative choice on a 375-rack building.
- Live power is dated September 2026 on the current card; the 0.9 MW figure is from the 2025 report; the 1.2 MW ceiling is from a page last updated in 2022.
- Tenant load is derived, not disclosed. The 32% figure divides 0.38 by 1.2. No occupancy percentage is published for this site.
- PUE is not published anywhere by Sify for Vashi, which matters because a 1 kW rack hall running older cooling is likely to be inefficient per useful watt.
- No site area or floor area is published beyond the roughly 10,325 sq ft of whitespace.
- Whether the building is owned or leased is not stated. This is the single most important unknown for anybody valuing the asset.
- What would close it. An occupancy or load figure, and the tenure of the International Infotech Park floors.
6Sources
Sources: the Sify Mumbai data centre page carrying the 0.38 MW card figure; the Sify data centre portfolio page; Sify Infinit Spaces Mumbai data centre page dated 30 June 2025; the older Sify Vashi data centre page and its 375-rack, 1.2 MW specification; the Sify Infinit Spaces integrated report of 2025; DataCenterMap specifications; and the Sify release marking 21 years of continuous operation at Vashi.