Equinix has officially launched its first International Business Exchange (IBX) AI-ready data centre in Chennai, marking a significant step in supporting digital transformation, business resilience, and AI-driven innovation in India.
The new CN1 facility, located in Siruseri, is directly interconnected with Equinix’s three existing IBX data centres in Mumbai, creating a strong digital backbone for enterprises. At launch, CN1 offers 800 cabinets of capacity, with plans to expand to 4,250 cabinets in the future. Equinix invested US$69 million to develop the initial phase of the centre.
While details of the IT load were not disclosed, CN1 is engineered for 99.999% uptime and integrates Equinix’s full interconnection suite, including Equinix Fabric, enabling hybrid multicloud services. The centre is also equipped with liquid cooling technology, designed to support the compute-intensive, high-density workloads driving AI and other emerging technologies.
Chennai is increasingly becoming a hub for research and AI investment, as Tamil Nadu positions itself as an innovation leader. This aligns with India’s national ambition to strengthen its presence in advanced technologies such as AI, quantum computing, blockchain, and edge computing.
The addition of CN1 provides Chennai-based enterprises with low-latency access to the cloud-rich ecosystem at Equinix’s Mumbai campus, which hosts direct on-ramps to AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. This ensures seamless, secure connectivity for businesses, customers, and partners.
“CN1 enables customers in Chennai to connect into a dynamic digital ecosystem, giving them secure and low-latency access to partners and providers that are critical to their growth,” said Manoj Paul, Managing Director for India at Equinix.
