The Scoop
Singapore’s CapitaLand Investment is targeting Gulf investors for a $200 million-$250 million fund to build data centers in India as the world’s most populous country emerges as an artificial intelligence powerhouse, an executive told Semafor.
“CLI has a global network of capital partners and aims to attract even more investors from the Middle East to invest in our listed and private funds,” Sanjeev Dasgupta, CEO at CapitaLand Investment India, said in an interview in Abu Dhabi.
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The real estate investment firm — with $90 billion in funds under management and backed by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek — is looking to deepen its investments in AI infrastructure in India at a time when the country is undergoing a rapid technological transformation.
India’s capacity for computing power is expected to reach 17 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 50%, according to New York investment bank Jefferies, driven in part by regulations to keep more data local. It has also begun to reverse a long-running talent retention problem, with one in five AI researchers staying home to find work, up from near zero in 2019, according to a May report from the United Nations.
Of all the Gulf state-backed AI investors, the UAE has the largest foreign footprint, pouring billions into opportunities abroad — in India, as well as France, Italy, and the US — as part of a massive push to become a global technology leader.
Abu Dhabi AI conglomerate G42 established G42 India in 2023, tapping a former Hong Kong-listed Xiaomi executive to become CEO, and a year later announced plans to build up to 2 GW of AI data centers in India and develop one of the country’s largest supercomputers. At the same time it has launched NANDA, a Hindi large language model.
Last week, it joined up with Italian artificial intelligence startup iGenius to develop a major AI supercomputer in Italy, as part of a $40 billion investment commitment the UAE has made into the European country.