At a glance

  • Narendra Modi visited Melbourne from 8 to 10 July 2026, meeting about 20 chief executives with Anthony Albanese at the Australia-India CEO Forum hosted by the Business Council of Australia.

  • Robin Khuda, who helped set the forum agenda from the BCA board, used the visit to argue that Australian super funds remain “significantly underexposed” to India.

  • AirTrunk is committing US$30 billion to build more than 5GW of capacity in India by 2030, backed by Blackstone and CPPIB.

  • Australian capital now flows to India three ways: AirTrunk builds there, Sharon AI sells compute into it, and Firmus kit runs inside Indian facilities.

  • AustralianSuper used the visit to add A$500 million to India’s NIIF, lifting its India exposure to A$3.3 billion.

Modi in Melbourne, capital in the room

Narendra Modi flew into Melbourne on Wednesday 8 July 2026 for a two-day visit, his first to the city in more than a decade. The centrepiece for business was the Australia-India CEO Forum, hosted by the Business Council of Australia on 9 July, where Modi and Albanese met about 20 chief executives at the Sofitel. Modi used the forum to set a US$100 billion two-way trade target by 2030 and pressed for early conclusion of the stalled Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement.

AustralianSuper chief executive Paul Schroder, BHP Australia president Geraldine Slattery, GrainCorp’s Robert Spurway and Sydney Airport’s Scott Charlton were in the room. AirTrunk founder Robin Khuda was not, but he had helped set the forum agenda from his seat on the BCA board and stayed overseas while his pitch to super funds ran.

Khuda’s intervention, made to the Australian Financial Review’s Patrick Durkin ahead of the forum, was blunt. “Australian superannuation funds remain significantly underexposed to India despite its extraordinary long-term growth potential,” he said, calling the country “an outstanding place to invest when you take a long-term view.” He wants faster approvals for bilateral investment and “greater regulatory co-ordination” to move capital in both directions.

AirTrunk is building US$30 billion of capacity in India

In June 2026 Khuda met Modi to flag a US$30 billion program to build more than 5GW of data centre capacity in India by 2030, backed by Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. That single commitment dwarfs anything AirTrunk has announced at home this year.

The build is already moving. In April 2026 AirTrunk acquired Mumbai-based Lumina CloudInfra to enter the market, a deal that adds about 600MW of planned capacity and up to US$5 billion of development potential across Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad, as we set out when AirTrunk became the only Australian operator in the 2026 data centre M&A top 10. It has since signed a letter of intent with the Government of Maharashtra for a three-gigawatt hub at Raigad on the outskirts of Mumbai, a project reported at around US$21 billion. A platform built in Sydney and sold to a Blackstone-led consortium for A$24 billion is now one of the largest single builders of Indian digital infrastructure.

Khuda has said AI “should become a defining pillar of the partnership between the two countries.” AirTrunk keeps more than 1.2GW operating and committed across its Sydney and Melbourne campuses, and its largest new commitments now sit in India, Japan and Malaysia, part of the regional JLL Asia-Pacific supercycle worth US$772 billion we have tracked.

What Australian operators and neoclouds are doing in India

AirTrunk is the largest example, not the only one. Australian data centre and AI-infrastructure capital reaches India in three different directions, and the distinction decides who carries the risk and who books the revenue.

Operator

How it reaches India

Detail

AirTrunk

Building in India

Lumina CloudInfra acquired April 2026 (~600MW planned, up to US$5bn across Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad); Raigad 3GW LOI with the Government of Maharashtra; US$30bn / 5GW-plus flagged by 2030, Blackstone and CPPIB backed

Sharon AI

Selling compute into India

US$1.25bn agreement with Indian provider ESDS, contracted to run on about 8,200 NVIDIA B300 GPUs in an Australian data centre, by Sharon AI’s account

Firmus (Sustainable Metal Cloud)

Hardware deployed in India

HyperCube immersion units inside ST Telemedia Global Data Centres facilities across Singapore, India and Australia

Source: primary company disclosures and trade coverage, July 2026.

Sharon AI runs in the opposite direction: an Australian operator selling sovereign compute to an Indian customer while keeping the GPUs, the data and the certification onshore. By Sharon AI’s account, its ESDS contract, the largest it has signed, is set to run on roughly 8,200 B300 GPUs installed in an Australian facility, as we covered in the US$1.6 billion raise backed by Oaktree. If it delivers, that keeps the value and the jobs in Australia even as the demand sits offshore. NEXTDC’s own Asian push, by contrast, has run through Malaysia and its KL1 opening rather than India.

Why India is the market Khuda is pointing at

India’s installed data centre capacity is on track to reach roughly 1.7GW to 2.0GW by the end of 2026, backed by close to US$30 billion of committed investment, with Mumbai holding about 49% of the market, Chennai 18%, and Hyderabad emerging on state incentives. The Indian Brand Equity Foundation puts the market on a path to about US$22 billion by 2030. Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad are precisely the three cities AirTrunk named for its Lumina build.

Our analysis of CBRE’s 2026 Asia-Pacific outlook covered India’s promotion into the top “Leading” tier of data centre markets, alongside Australia, Japan, mainland China and Malaysia. India’s elevation reflects hyperscale demand, data-localisation law and government AI programs. The training workload that fills these campuses is not latency-sensitive, so it locates wherever power and land are cheapest, the logic that both sends capital to India and underpins our explainer on what an AI data centre is. The comparison Khuda is inviting super funds to make is between a mature Australian market doubling toward 3,100MW by 2030 and a larger one growing faster off a lower base.

The capital gap, and who gains from closing it

The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia estimates the A$4.5 trillion sector’s exposure to emerging markets sits below 5%, with India a small fraction of that. BCA chief Bran Black told the forum that India is Australia’s fifth-largest trading partner but only its tenth-largest investment partner, on two-way trade of A$50 billion and two-way investment of A$70 billion. The gap between trade and investment is the space Khuda wants filled.

Some of it moved during the visit. AustralianSuper used the morning of Modi’s arrival to commit a further A$500 million to India’s National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, lifting its total India exposure across asset classes to about A$3.3 billion.

Khuda is not a disinterested advocate: he sits on the BCA board, helped set the forum agenda, and AirTrunk’s US$30 billion India commitment is the single largest beneficiary of exactly the two-way capital liberalisation he is urging. That does not make the argument wrong. It makes AirTrunk the clearest test of whether Australian institutional money follows Australian operators into India, or leaves them to Blackstone and CPPIB.