Schneider Electric already runs a large business in India. Power distribution, grid automation, building management, industrial controls. It is the kind of footprint that takes decades to build and represents a substantial share of the company's emerging markets revenue. So when Sumati Sahgal, VP of Secure Power and Data Centres for Schneider's Greater India Zone, says the data center segment will outpace the rest of that business, the statement carries weight. She told Reuters that data centers will "contribute to a much faster pace of growth than what the rest of the core business sees." That is not a forecast about a small side business. The data center segment already accounts for 15 to 20 percent of Schneider's total India revenues, growing at double-digit rates.
What is driving that growth is not a mystery. India is in the middle of a data center construction cycle unlike anything it has seen before, and the thermal management requirements of that cycle are categorically different from what the country built in the previous decade. The old spec sheets do not apply. Operators building AI infrastructure in Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, and Pune are targeting rack densities that air cooling cannot serve. Schneider makes the equipment that fills that gap.
The company's data center portfolio spans the full thermal and power stack. At the power layer: UPS systems, switchgear, automatic transfer switches, power distribution units, busway. At the cooling layer: precision air conditioning, in-row cooling, computer room air handlers, and the thermal management infrastructure that supports liquid cooling deployments. The EcoBreeze and EcoAisle systems handle containment and airside management. The CDU and cooling distribution products handle the liquid side.
This matters because Schneider's India data center revenue is not primarily a hardware sales number. It is a systems integration business. A facility deploying liquid cooling in India does not just order cold plates and manifolds from a vendor. It needs the CDUs, the secondary loop piping, the leak detection, the monitoring and controls, and the power infrastructure that the cooling system depends on. Schneider sells across that entire stack, which is why their data center revenue grows faster than the facility count would suggest.
The two strongest growth themes Schneider has named in India are data centers and grid modernization. Both are infrastructure plays where the company holds long-term contracts, not one-time equipment sales. Grid modernization in India, driven by renewable integration and electrification mandates under the government's National Electricity Plan, creates sustained demand for Schneider's substation automation and distribution management systems. Data centers create sustained demand for everything from UPS replacement cycles to cooling system expansions as operators add capacity. The two themes compound rather than compete.
India's data center market is projected to reach $31.36 billion by 2035, growing at a 13.37% CAGR. That projection sits on top of a buildout already in motion. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have each announced multi-billion dollar investments in Indian cloud and AI infrastructure over the past 18 months. The Indian government's Digital India program, combined with the National AI Mission and specific incentive frameworks for data center investment in states like Telangana and Maharashtra, has created a policy environment that actively accelerates facility construction.
The domestic demand side is equally real. India has over 900 million internet users, a rapidly expanding fintech sector, and a government digitization program that is moving health records, tax systems, and identity verification onto cloud infrastructure. Those workloads need processing capacity. The AI inference layer on top of them needs cooling infrastructure that can handle what that capacity actually draws.
The difference between India's current buildout and previous waves of data center expansion is rack density. The new facilities going into the ground in India are designed for AI rack densities at 100kW and above. Some specs are targeting 150kW. A facility built to those densities cannot add air cooling capacity to keep pace. It needs liquid-ready infrastructure from the first concrete pour. Operators who are building now are making that decision at the design stage, not retrofitting later.
This is the part that matters for the global cooling supply chain. India is not building the intermediate generation of high-density air-cooled data centers that the United States, Europe, and parts of Asia built between 2015 and 2022. Those facilities, designed around 20-40kW per rack with hot aisle containment and precision air handlers, represent the legacy fleet that operators in mature markets are now struggling to retrofit for AI workloads.
India is going straight to liquid-ready architecture. The economics make sense: it costs less to design a facility for liquid cooling during construction than to retrofit one later, and the operators building in India in 2026 know what rack densities they need to support. They are not speccing for today's servers and hoping to upgrade later. They are speccing for Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 systems drawing 120kW and the racks that follow them.
For Schneider, this means the product mix in India skews toward higher-value cooling infrastructure earlier in the facility lifecycle than it would in a market retrofitting existing capacity. A facility that installs CDUs, secondary loop plumbing, and liquid-ready power distribution during construction is a different customer than one adding cooling capacity in phases. The contract value is higher. The integration complexity is higher. The margin profile reflects that.
When a company with Schneider's manufacturing footprint and distribution network reports double-digit growth in a specific market segment, the supply chain upstream of that segment is receiving a demand signal. CDU lead times in Europe and North America have run 16 to 28 weeks for the past two years as hyperscale orders compete with enterprise orders for production capacity. India's buildout adds demand to a supply chain that is already constrained.
Schneider has manufacturing operations in India, including facilities in Hyderabad and Vadodara, that serve the local market and export into Southeast Asia. Those facilities are not running idle. The question for operators planning Indian data center construction in 2027 and 2028 is whether Schneider's local manufacturing capacity can scale fast enough to meet the project pipeline without importing lead times from European or North American plants.
The broader cooling supply chain question is what India's buildout does to global allocation. The liquid cooling supply chain is already stretched across North American and European deployments. Adding a market growing at 13% CAGR that is installing liquid-ready infrastructure from the ground up does not reduce that pressure. Every CDU, every leak detection system, every secondary loop manifold that goes into a facility in Pune or Hyderabad is capacity that is not available for a facility in Northern Virginia or Frankfurt.
Sumati Sahgal runs Schneider's Secure Power and Data Centres business for the entire Greater India Zone. That is not a regional sales title. It covers the product lines that generate the 15 to 20 percent of India revenues that are already growing faster than the company's core. When she projects that those revenues will grow faster still, she is describing a demand trajectory she can see in the project pipeline, not extrapolating from a favorable quarter.
The signal here is not that Schneider is winning in India. Schneider has been positioned in Indian industrial infrastructure for decades. The signal is that the data center segment, which is newer and more capital-intensive than most of Schneider's core business, is growing fast enough within that established footprint to become a dominant share of it. That transition reflects what is happening on the ground: facilities that need cooling infrastructure matched to AI rack densities, built by operators who understand that the thermal management decision is a first-principles constraint, not a procurement afterthought.
India's data center market reaching $31.36 billion by 2035 at 13.37% CAGR means the construction pipeline is front-loaded toward the next four years. The facilities being permitted and financed now are the ones that will define whether Indian AI infrastructure runs efficiently or spends its first decade overheating. Schneider's outperformance in that segment is a direct read on how much of the new construction is being done right.