How is Equinix CN1 data centre built to scale 4,250 cabinets

Equinix has opened its first International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre in Siruseri, Chennai, extending its footprint in India beyond Mumbai. The data centre is built with an initial investment of USD 69 million in the first phase, with future expansion plans.

The facility currently spans six acres and is designed to serve the demand for digital infrastructure, cloud adoption, and AI-ready computing in southern India. Phase I has been fully deployed, Phase II is structurally complete, and land has been secured for Phase III and Phase IV expansion.

According to Equinix, the facility has fault-tolerant systems designed to deliver 99.99% uptime and will connect directly with the company’s three other data centres in Mumbai.

The facility is built on a 3+1 structure, with each floor holding a power capacity of 1.14 megawatts. At full-scale deployment, it can accommodate 4,260 cabinets. The first phase has launched with 800 cabinets, each rack offering a 20–25 kW capacity. The slab-to-slab height is six metres, and the structure’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is currently 1.46.

Cooling design and hot aisle containment

Equinix CN1 is designed to handle high-density workloads. For this, the company is using hot aisle containment as the primary cooling system, which separates hot and cold airflows in server rooms. It also employs liquid cooling mechanisms where required.

To support more efficient operations, Equinix is deploying a mix of direct-to-chip liquid cooling, rear-door heat exchangers, and airflow management to meet the demands of AI workloads.

India’s digital ecosystem

India is scaling up to support AI, quantum computing, blockchain, and edge workloads, which require high computing power and low-latency connectivity. According to the company, Equinix currently hosts more than 300 firms in India, including cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.

With the launch of CN1, customers in Chennai will be able to access this ecosystem and benefit from proximity to submarine cable landing points along the Tamil Nadu coast.

Manoj Paul, Managing Director of Equinix India, said the Chennai launch extends the digital ecosystem the company has built in Mumbai to enterprises and service providers in southern India. He added that support from the Tamil Nadu government and its agencies, including SIPCOT and the Industries Department, was critical in bringing the facility online.