Gautam Adani on Monday rode into India’s booming e-commerce industry by entering into a strategic partnership with Flipkart. The tie-up will see Adani Logistics set up one of the country’s largest warehousing facility for the Walmart controlled e-tailer.

Adani Logistics is a wholly owned subsidiary of Adani Ports & Special Economic Zone. As part of this partnership, Adani Logistics Ltd will construct a massive 534,000 sq ft fulfilment centre at its upcoming logistics hub in Mumbai that will be leased to Flipkart.

A joint press statement said that this centre will address the growing demand for e-commerce in Western India and support market access of several thousands of sellers and MSMEs in the region.

The centre is expected to be operational in the third quarter of 2022 and will have the capacity to house 10 million units of sellers’ inventory at any point. In addition to strengthening Flipkart’s supply chain infrastructure to support MSMEs and sellers, the facility will enhance local employment and create around 2,500 direct jobs and thousands of indirect jobs, the companies added.

Observers say that the partnership will help Flipkart to take the battle to key rivals such as Amazon and Reliance Retail.

The other leg of the partnership will see Flipkart developing its third data centre at the AdaniConnecX Chennai facility as part of one of the largest private cloud deployments in the country, thereby strengthening its growing marketplace e-commerce business in India.

The Adani group said that the data centre has been designed to meet the highest standards in reliability, security, and sustainability, which will capitalise on the capability of the Adanis as the largest solar player in the country to generate and source green power.

The AdaniConneX data centre is a new facility enabling Flipkart to mould the data centre to its growing infrastructure needs with a significant focus on security and keeping data locally within India. “This broad-ranging partnership across our logistics and data centre businesses is a unique business model, and we see this as a great opportunity to serve Flipkart’s physical as well as digital infrastructure needs,” Karan Adani, CEO of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone said.