India’s richest man Gautam Adani’s group said on Tuesday that the Rs 212 crore worth of spectrum it has bought in a millimeter wave band will be used to create a private network to support its businesses and data centres.
Adani Data Networks Ltd (ADNL), a unit of Adani Enterprises Ltd, acquired the right to use 400MHz of spectrum in the 26GHz millimeter wave band for 20 years in the auction that concluded on Monday.
Adani Group plans to use the ether for its data centers as well as the super app it is building to support businesses from electricity distribution to airports and gas retail to ports.
“The newly acquired 5G spectrum is expected to help create a unified digital platform that will accelerate the pace and scale of the Adani group’s digitization of its core infrastructure, primary industry and B2C business portfolio,” the group said in a statement.
The Adani group bought less than one percent of all spectrum sold in the auction and its purchase price was a fraction of the Rs 1.5 lakh crore bid received by the government.
The group’s broader strategy to digitally integrate its current and future businesses includes linking its data centers through a network of undersea and terrestrial cables, building the largest industrial operations cloud in the world, developing the super app to offer a range of services across its consumer base on DKK 400 million, and the establishment of a world-class AI center.
“Acquiring 400MHz spectrum is the group’s first step in the integration of its digital infrastructure portfolio, which includes data centers, terrestrial fiber and submarine cables, industrial cloud, AI innovation labs, cyber security and SuperApps,” it said.
Rival billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio was the top bidder in the spectrum auction, walking away with almost half of the airwaves sold. Telecom tycoon Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea Ltd were other major bidders.
Adani, chairman of the Adani Group, said his ports-to-energy conglomerate’s foray into the industrial 5G space will allow portfolio companies to offer a set of new add-on services that tap into all the other digital segments that are becoming build.
”Given that our portfolio is a highly distributed asset-intensive investment, all being revolutionized by sensorization and rapidly becoming IoT-enabled, we believe that the next data surge will be created more by machines than by humans as all units will be connected to each other. This data must be streamed, stored, processed and analyzed by other machines in real time, and this capability will change every single industry,” he said.
This volume will be exponentially higher and generated at the edge, especially in a country like India where the Tier 2 and 3 cities are witnessing the fastest all-round growth, he said.