This is the first Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) after Blackstone’s recent investment pact with the government of Maharashtra in Davos.
The US-based institutional investor signed three separate agreements in Davos with the state government as part of its broader strategy to expand its presence in India’s rapidly growing property and digital infrastructure sector.
To initiate this, Panchshil Realty’s subsidiary Gramercy Info Park has acquired a nearly 50-acre land parcel next to Reliance Corporate Park in Navi Mumbai’s Ghansoli area for Rs 900 crore including the consideration amount, levies, and charges.
Gramercy Info Park has acquired the entire land parcel located at MIDC Trans Thane Creek Industrial Area in two separate transactions. Both the deals were registered on February 11, showed documents accessed through realty data analytics platform Propstack.“The proposed data center will be developed as a built-to-suit facility for hyperscaler companies specializing in providing high-performance computing power and infrastructure designed to support large-scale workloads including cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and data-intensive applications,” said one of the persons mentioned above.Blackstone is currently in the process of building two data centres in Navi Mumbai and has invested over $300 million in each of these for an estimated total of 60 MW capacity.
These data centres, under the company name Lumina CloudInfra, are also being developed in partnership with Panchshil Realty. The new data centre investment will be in addition to this.
ET’s email query to Panchshil Realty remained unanswered until the time of going to press, while Blackstone declined to comment.
Blackstone has been one of the largest investors in the country with over $50 billion assets under management since its entry in India. Maharashtra has been a big beneficiary of this with around 40% of these funds invested in the state alone.
The company has taken aggressive bets on real estate and has already invested over $20 billion in the Indian real estate sector across key cities including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, the National Capital Region, Chennai and Kolkata, apart from Mumbai region.
The firm is the largest office owner in India with an office portfolio of 135 million sq ft across 50 assets in the country. With two office real estate investment trusts (REITs) executed and exited, Blackstone is now in the process of filing for their third office REIT in the country.
