India's data centers will use eight times as much electricity in 2035 as they did last year, BloombergNEF said in a report published Wednesday, and for most of that period the extra power is likely to come from running the country's existing coal plants harder.

The research firm expects data center consumption in India to rise from 11 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 91 terawatt-hours in 2035. The figures are not new: BNEF gave the same numbers in an India study in August, the news agency IANS reported at the time. The grid report landed in the same week that Andhra Pradesh collected a new round of gigawatt-scale data center pledges at an investment summit in Visakhapatnam. For investors in Indian utilities and grid equipment makers, the report's central point is that generation is not the constraint. Wires and substations are.

BNEF's India forecast: plenty of power, too few substations

India has substantial generating capacity and an interstate grid that can move electricity between regions, BNEF said. The question is whether local substations and transmission lines can be built fast enough around the places where data centers cluster.

The clustering is pronounced. Live IT capacity has quadrupled in six years to about 1.7 gigawatts, and Maharashtra, home to Mumbai and Navi Mumbai, hosts about 56% of it, according to the report, which uses DC Byte data as of June 10. The pipeline is much larger than the operating market: about 0.35 gigawatts is under construction, 3.28 gigawatts has secured land, power and permits, and a further 15.5 gigawatts is at an early stage.

Maharashtra shows where the strain appears first. Utilities in the state have sanctioned about 6 gigawatts of data center load, but only around 964 megawatts has been released so far, BNEF said. It read the gap as a sign that the existing network cannot take all the approved demand at once.

Connection times vary with size. Smaller urban facilities can often connect within six to 12 months where distribution capacity exists, while campuses above 100 megawatts may take 24 to 36 months or longer if they need new substations or transmission lines, the report said.

States are building. Maharashtra is developing a 765-kilovolt substation and transmission link in Navi Mumbai to support 3.5 gigawatts of expected data center demand. Andhra Pradesh is planning 765-kilovolt, 400-kilovolt and 220-kilovolt infrastructure around Visakhapatnam for more than 15 gigawatts of expected demand by 2034. In September the federal government approved 1.86 trillion rupees ($19.6 billion) for the third tranche of its Green Energy Corridor program, about three-quarters of it for transmission networks inside states, BNEF said.

Andhra Pradesh pledges add to the queue

The demand side moved again last week. ReNew Energy Global said on Thursday that it would build a 1 gigawatt data center in Anakapalli, near Visakhapatnam, for about 670 billion rupees, part of roughly 800 billion rupees of new investment in the state, according to pv magazine India and Business Standard.

More than 6 gigawatts of hyperscale capacity is at various stages of execution in Visakhapatnam, including Google's $15 billion, 1 gigawatt AI data center, Business Standard reported. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu told the CII Partnership Summit on Friday that water would not be a bottleneck for the projects.

The two-day summit drew investment commitments of 9.98 trillion rupees, the newspaper reported. Deals signed on Friday included a 313.87 billion rupee AI data center project by AM AI Factory Ltd. and a 370 billion rupee hyperscale data center by Panchshil Realty. Such pledges are statements of intent, not connected load.

BNEF found no strong evidence that speculative applications are clogging India's grid queues. It did note that the bank guarantee for a direct connection to the interstate grid, $2,128 per megawatt, is more than an order of magnitude below the roughly $50,000 per megawatt that U.S. developers told the firm they would pay for a queue position. The report suggested that states short of capacity could allocate it to projects that can show land, permits and financing.

Coal carries the load until the late 2030s

Coal and gas account for 68% of India's on-grid power supply, according to the report. Under BNEF's Economic Transition Scenario, existing coal plants meet much of the additional data center demand through the mid-2030s because they are cheap to run and can supply power around the clock.

That does not mean many new coal plants. BNEF's modeling shows relatively little coal capacity added, with battery deployment rising from 2031 and solar generation climbing strongly from 2037. New solar paired with storage becomes cheaper than running an existing coal plant in 2041, the firm estimates.

Operators have ways to buy clean power in the meantime, and their purchases are already supporting new projects. CleanMax, an independent power producer, said in its IPO filing that data and AI customers made up 42% of its 5.7 gigawatt contracted renewable portfolio by March 2026, up from 14% two years earlier, the report said. Costs differ by state. Cross-subsidy surcharges on such purchases range from $13 to $21 per megawatt-hour in the main hubs, and Maharashtra's is the highest.

The pattern is regional. BNEF expects data center power use in Malaysia to reach 45 terawatt-hours by 2035, from 7 terawatt-hours in 2025, and in Indonesia to reach 26 terawatt-hours, from 3 terawatt-hours. Both grids rely heavily on coal and gas. Capital Times has reported separately on SoftBank's data center plans in Sarawak and on Tata Power's latest quarterly results.

India has no national data center policy, and at least 16 states have their own, BNEF said. Junior IT minister Jitin Prasada said on Oct. 14 that the government was preparing one and wanted to keep consumers from paying more for electricity, Reuters reported, without giving a date. BNEF expects the Ministry of Power to add grid-flexibility requirements for large data centers in the National Electricity Policy 2026.