THE DATA CENTRE INTERVIEW
CtrlS Datacenters( CtrlS) operates more than 370MW of live capacity and holds over 4GW at various stages of development, a pipeline underwritten in part by a recently announced US $ 740m investment partnership with CPP Investments. The commitment points to a shift in how digital infrastructure is being built and financed in India, where AI workloads are beginning to sit alongside cloud migration as a driver of new capacity.
Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder & CEO of CtrlS Datacenters, has seen firsthand how the change registers less in the size of individual campuses than in the way projects are sequenced, based on his robust experience of building digital infrastructure in India.
Rack densities, cooling design and grid connection now have to be resolved together, and much of the work that determines a delivery date happens well before any shovels hit the earth.
Critical path starts before groundbreaking The visible milestone of a groundbreaking ceremony tends to be treated as the point at which a project begins. Sridhar places the starting line considerably earlier, at the point where design, engineering and procurement decisions are locked in against one another.
“ The industry often sees groundbreaking as the start of a project,” he says.“ The critical path begins much
“Building AI infrastructure at scale is ultimately a national ecosystem effort”
Sridhar Pinnapuredy Founder & CEO CtrlS
earlier, incorporating planning, design, engineering, procurement and execution as a unified process.
“ AI-ready data centres have fundamentally changed project execution. Higher rack densities, liquid cooling, larger power capacities and advanced network infrastructure require multiple workstreams to be planned and executed in parallel rather than sequentially.
“ At CtrlS, our focus is on front-end engineering and integrated execution to ensure alignment from planning through commissioning. The objective is not simply to build faster, but to deliver resilient, AI-ready digital infrastructure that is operationally ready from day one.”
24 September 2026