Adani To Invest USD 100 billion In Energy And Digital Spaces

Gautam Adani has announced that the Adani Group will be investing USD 100 billion over the next decade in new energy and digital spaces including data centres. The revelations were made at the Forbes Global CEO conference in Singapore on September 27, 2022.

“As a group, we will invest over USD 100 billion of capital in the next decade. We have earmarked 70 per cent of this investment for the energy transition space,” Adani said.

Adani’s ambitious investment plans in new and emerging areas come after Mukesh Ambani, Reliance Industries chairman, unveiled last month his group’s plan to invest INR 2.75 trillion over the next five years in 5G services as well as in expanding capacities in the core petrochemical and oil business.

Earlier this month, Adani Group had said that it will build three giga factories for manufacturing solar modules, wind turbines and hydrogen electrolysers as part of a USD 70-billion investment in clean energy by 2030.

With interests spanning sea ports, airports, green energy, cement and data centres, the combined market capitalisation of the group’s listed companies is USD 260 billion. The Group is already the world’s largest solar player.

“In addition to our existing 20 GW renewables portfolio, the new business will be augmented by another 45 GW of hybrid renewable power generation spread over 100,000 hectares – an area 1.4 times that of Singapore. This will lead to commercialisation of 3 million tonne of green hydrogen,” Adani said.

The Group’s plan to build three Giga factories – one for a 10 GW silicon-based photovoltaic value-chain will be backward-integrated from raw silicon to solar panels, a 10 GW integrated wind-turbine manufacturing facility and a 5 GW hydrogen electrolyser factory.

 “Today, we can confidently state that we have a line of sight to first become one of the least expensive producers of the green electron, and thereafter the least expensive producer of green hydrogen,” he said.

Digital space, he said, seeks to benefit from the energy transition adjacency.

 “The Indian data centre market is witnessing explosive growth. This sector consumes more energy than any other industry in the world and, therefore, our move to build green data centres is a game-changing differentiator,” Adani said.

The Group plans to interconnect data centres through a series of terrestrial and globally-linked undersea cables drawn at its ports and build consumer-based super-apps that will bring hundreds of millions of the Group’s B2C consumers on one common digital platform.

“We also just finished building the world’s largest sustainability cloud that already has a hundred of our solar and wind sites running on it – all off a single giant command and control centre that will soon be augmented by a global A-I lab,” he said.

These new businesses will add to the growing Adani empire, which already is the largest airports and sea ports operator in India. It is the country’s highest valued FMCG company, the second-largest cement manufacturer and the largest integrated energy player.

“The point I would like to make is that India is full of incredible opportunities. The real India growth story is just starting.

“This is the best window for companies to embrace India’s economic resurgence and the incredible multi-decade tailwind the world’s largest and most youthful democracy offers. India’s next three decades will be the most defining years for the impact it will have on the world,” he added.

Commenting on China, Adani said once the champion of globalisation, Beijing is now facing challenges.

“I anticipate that China, which was seen as the foremost champion of globalisation, will feel increasingly isolated. Increasing nationalism, supply chain risk mitigation and technology restrictions will have an impact,” Adani said.