Bengal is planning to beef up its IT infrastructure by adding a new data centre at Siliguri with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities.

State government sources said that within the next 3-4 months, multiple GPU (graphical processing units) powered purpose-built units are expected to be put up in the proposed data centre that would allow the state to use more than 350 installed applications based on AI and ML. More than 2,300 concurrent users can use this facility in real-time, a senior government official said.

The state is also putting up a database as a service facility at the West Bengal State Data Centre (WBSDC) in Sector V, having significantly augmented its capabilities.

The state government in its economic review of 2023-24 has said that the augmentation of WBSDC has been successfully completed with 4 petabyte storage capacity, 52 terabyte RAM, 25 gigabyte per second bandwidth and 2000 plus VM compute capacity.

Around 80 departments/directorates and other government bodies have already hosted their applications at WBSDC, Monibhandar.

Government officials said a disaster recovery site of WBSDC has been set up and is operational at Purulia. “We have opened our SDC to start-ups. Seventeen start-ups have hosted their applications,” a government official said.

The Bengal Institute of Business Studies in collaboration with Nasscom hosted a data science conference on Friday to explore the advancements, trends and best practices in data science and AI.

Data Centre Boom

JLL on Friday said that India’s data centre industry is projected to increase from 853 MW in 2023 to 1,645 MW by 2026. The expansion will drive a demand for 10 million square feet of real estate space, attracting investments worth $5.7 billion.

The surge is fuelled by the increasing adoption of AI.