Another new opportunity for the digital revolution has come to the fore in Andhra Pradesh. State Education, IT and Electronics Minister Nara Lokesh, who is visiting Singapore, held a key meeting with S.T. Telemedia Investments (India) Head Ritu Mehlawat. As a result of this meeting, there are strong hopes that this will be a good start for the efforts to make Visakhapatnam a leading “data city” in the country.
In this meeting, Minister Lokesh proposed to S.T. Telemedia to set up a state-of-the-art green energy-based data center in Visakhapatnam. Lokesh clarified that Visakhapatnam is a good place to set up data centers as the company is looking to double its operations in India. He explained that the land and infrastructure available in Visakhapatnam are suitable for a data center as per the future requirements.
Lokesh urged ST Telemedia to work with the AP government to build a strong digital ecosystem in the state by setting up state-of-the-art computing infrastructure. Ritu Mehlawat responded positively to Minister Lokesh’s proposals. On this occasion, she explained the current activities of her company in India.
She said that currently, they are operating 30 data centers in 10 major cities in India with a critical IT load of 311 MW. She revealed that they aim to increase the capacity of their data centers to 550 MW in the future. Ritu Mehlawat assured that the proposals made by the Andhra Pradesh government will be brought to the attention of the high-level team of her company and a decision will be taken soon.
Headquartered in Singapore, S.T. Telemedia is a subsidiary of Singaporean government-owned Temasek Holdings. It is one of the world’s largest private data center operators, with operations in the communications, media, infrastructure technology (ICT) and data centers sectors globally. In India, it operates under the name STT GDC India. If S.T. Telemedia comes to Visakhapatnam as planned, the state will get state-of-the-art digital infrastructure. Visakhapatnam in particular will emerge as a powerful data hub. This will provide huge job opportunities.
