Mumbai: NXTGEN Datacentre and Cloud Technologies have appointed investment bank Avendus to raise $300 million at a valuation of nearly $900 million, two people familiar with the matter told MINT.
“The company has been in the market for some time, but has recently appointed Avendus to raise funds,” said one of the people. “If this round goes as planned, it will be the largest so far.”
NXTGEN did not respond to Mint’s request for comment, while Avendus declined to comment.
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According to its official website, NXTGEN Data Center and Cloud Technology is a technology service company that provides data centers and cloud-based solutions with a focus on giving businesses a scalable, secure and cost-effective infrastructure in public, private and industry clouds.
The company last raised $13.5 million from a group of investors including International Finance Corporation (IFC), Axon Partners Group and Intel Capital as part of its 2015 Series B financing round. It competes with companies like Vantage Data Centers, Princeton Digital Group and Alligned, according to market intelligence provider Tracxn.
PE company bets on data centers
Several large private equity firms, including Blackstone, Everston and Brookfield, have shined in their data center operations through joint ventures or direct investments.
Blackstone launched a data center platform called Lumina Cloudinfra and plans to invest more than $300 million in the Navi Mumbai Hyperscale data center, while Reliance Industries also entered a fast-growing segment last year with Brookfield in Canada.
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In 2021, Everstone Group established a joint venture partnership with Yondr Group, a global developer, owner-operator and service provider of premium data centers to deploy $1 billion to develop data centers in India.
NXTGEN’s services are particularly important at a time when tech giants and geopolitical groups are leveraging data from emerging economies to attract attention to relying on foreign cloud infrastructure. This has led to a stricter privacy policy, which emphasizes data sovereignty, control and long-term governance, according to the company.
Indian Data Center Market
According to a CBRE report published in May 2024, India’s data center market is expected to grow from US$4.35 billion in 2021 to 2027, up 15.07% from US$4.35 billion in 2021.
CBRE said more than 90% of the new data is expected to be concentrated in major cities such as Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, Bangalore and Hyderabad, adding that the leading players are still exploring untapped markets such as Kochi, Jaipur, Jaipur, Jaipur, Jaipur, Jaipur, Jaipur, ahmedabad, luckynow, Patnow, Patna and Visakhapatnam and the growth of the next data.
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Last month, NXTGEN outlined plans to deploy 12,000 GPUs in May as demand for AI computing continues to grow in India, according to a report from the Business World. Currently, it has over 1000 GPUs, including NVIDIA L40 and H100 models.
According to the report, the company’s founder and CEO Rajgopal estimates that NXTGEN will require billions of dollars in the next three years and can also assess public listings based on the interests of investors. It has more than 400 employees and plans to hire more AI engineers to meet the needs.
In fiscal 23, the company reported $24.9 million in operating revenue, up from $23 million in the same period last year. According to a report by Tracxn, it lost $10.6 million, compared with a loss of $5.4 million for fiscal year 2.4 million.
