Inside the privacy fortress that is Yotta’s NM1 data centre facility

From the outside, it looks like a regular apartment, but inside, it resembles a Dan Brown thriller — with seven layers of security and restricted access to sensitive areas.

“How was your day?” is a tricky question for employees at the tier-4 data centre of Yotta Data Services in Navi Mumbai to answer. The worker bees engaged busily in making Asia’s biggest data centre – the NM1 facility in Panvel – operational, have to check their ‘shop-talk’ when talking to any outsider, including family members.

From the security personnel sitting at the campus entry gate kiosk to the sales manager chatting up customers inside the facility, every employee signs a non-disclosure agreement on their work. Even at home, employees have to filter out certain aspects of their daily life to ensure that all information about people, organisation, and infrastructure, remains totally confidential. A tier-4 certified data centre signifies highest reliability and as India races to compete with Singapore and Hong Kong as a quality data storage destination, confidentiality is paramount.

Currently, the facility’s data halls are packed with hundreds of racks that are rented by different enterprises on a shared basis. These racks host the servers that contain all the information stored by a company. Larger entities and hypescalers (cloud service providers) ask for separate sectioned-off data racks with their own additional security measures like biometrics or locks. Enterprise customers may take 10 racks in a shared environment while hyperscalers may take up to 50 racks or a whole cage.

While from the outside, the building looks like any residential complex, inside it seems to be straight from the pages of a Dan Brown thriller with seven-layers of security checks and restricted access to floors containing sensitive equipment. Some of the floors supply Uninterrupted Power Supply and are designated UPS floors. Temperature and humidity throughout the building are monitored carefully.

Power play

The scale of infrastructure needed to run operations is gargantuan. One standard rack consumes enough energy to power 20-75 homes with basic appliances running at the same time. With 7,000 data racks spread out across the data centre, the entire facility has a capacity of 30.4 megawatts – that’s enough to power 15-20 shopping malls with all their lights, escalators and air-conditioning. With GPU deployment, this capacity is expected to grow to 50 MW – a massive amount of energy!

The company gets its electricity supply from two energy providers — Tata Power and Adani — and maintains back-up power units that can sustain power for another half an hour in case of an emergency.

The noisiest part of the campus is the docking yards where people are overseeing shipments of materials. The second noisiest part is the canteen where employees eat and unwind. Yotta is looking to speak with a couple of hyperscalers to set up three more such buildings in the same campus to create a data centre park rather than just a standalone building.

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Published on August 10, 2025