Inside AirTrunk's $30 Billion, 5 GW Bet to Power India's AI Future

“India is emerging as one of the world’s most attractive destinations for long-term digital infrastructure investment,” Khuda told reporters, calling the country “one of the foundational markets of the global AI economy” .

The announcement caps a deliberate entry strategy that began months earlier.

How AirTrunk entered India: the Lumina CloudInfra acquisition

AirTrunk, founded by Australian billionaire Robin Khuda, operates hyperscale data centres across Asia Pacific and the Middle East. In 2024, Blackstone acquired the company for A$24 billion (~$16 billion) .

India had been on Khuda’s roadmap since at least November 2025, when he told Bloomberg that the country would be AirTrunk’s next market, calling the current AI buildout “the single-biggest gold rush in human history” .

In April 2026, AirTrunk made its move by acquiring Lumina CloudInfra, an India-focused data centre developer that Blackstone itself had launched in 2022. The deal — effectively an internal Blackstone consolidation — gave AirTrunk an immediate operating foothold and access to Lumina’s development pipeline of roughly 600 MW across five sites: BOM1, BOM2, and BOM3 in Mumbai; MAA1 in Chennai; and HYD1 in Hyderabad. That pipeline represents up to $5 billion in development value .

“This is just the starting point,” Khuda said after the acquisition closed. “India is one of the largest and fastest growing markets for hyperscale and AI infrastructure worldwide, and the demand we’re seeing from customers is overwhelming.”

The $30 billion expansion: what we know

The June 5 commitment adds more than 5 GW of new capacity on top of the inherited 600 MW Lumina pipeline, to be deployed over approximately four years . AirTrunk has described the investment as supporting “digital infrastructure capacity” across multiple sites countrywide, though specific locations for the new builds have not been fully detailed .

One major piece of the puzzle is already taking shape in Maharashtra. On June 2, Khuda signed a letter of intent with the Maharashtra government for a 3 GW data centre campus in Raigad, attached to a reported $21 billion investment figure .

Andhra Pradesh is also courting AirTrunk. State IT minister Nara Lokesh met Khuda in Mumbai on June 1 to pitch Visakhapatnam as part of a broader 6 GW AI hub plan that already includes projects from Google, Reliance, and AdaniConneX .

The bigger picture: how AirTrunk’s bet compares

AirTrunk’s $30 billion pledge is the single largest foreign hyperscale commitment to India’s AI infrastructure to date, but it lands in an increasingly crowded field.

Adani Group ($100 billion): In February 2026, the Adani Group committed $100 billion over the next decade to build AI-specialized data centres and renewable energy infrastructure, aiming to create what it calls India’s “energy-compute backbone” for the AI age. The plan is expected to catalyse an additional $150 billion across manufacturing, servers, and sovereign cloud services . Adani’s joint venture AdaniConneX is already building a 2 GW national platform and has committed up to $5 billion toward Google’s AI infrastructure hub .

Google ($15 billion+): In October 2025, Google announced a $15 billion push into India’s AI landscape, headlined by a partnership with AdaniConneX and Bharti Airtel to build India’s largest AI data centre campus in Visakhapatnam. The gigawatt-scale campus will house TPU and GPU hardware, supported by new subsea cable connectivity and green energy infrastructure .

Reliance Industries: Reliance Jio is building a multi-GW AI data centre footprint in Jamnagar, Gujarat, and has partnered with NVIDIA to build sovereign AI supercomputing infrastructure. The company is actively courting global hyperscalers and GPU cloud providers to lease capacity .

Tata Group: TCS launched HyperVault AI Data Centre Ltd, a joint venture with TPG targeting 1.2 GW of capacity — an amount that matches the combined capacity of all existing data centres in India as of late 2025 .

Market estimates suggest global hyperscalers and Indian conglomerates will invest more than $50 billion over the next five to seven years, pushing domestic data centre capacity from roughly 1 GW to about 9 GW .

What it means

The convergence of sovereign ambition, hyperscaler demand, and favorable government policy has turned India into one of the hottest AI infrastructure markets in the world. AirTrunk’s $30 billion bet signals that foreign capital — particularly the long-term, institutional money Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board represent — now sees India not as an emerging option, but as a foundational pillar of the global AI economy .

As Khuda put it after his meeting with PM Modi: “One of the strongest messages we received is that India is now considered one of our most significant long-term investment destinations.”