Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani said on Tuesday that his company would invest $100 billion over the next decade, mainly in new energy and digital space that includes data centres. Speaking at the Forbes Global CEO conference in Singapore, Adani said 70 per cent of this investment would be in the energy transition space.
"As a Group, we will invest over USD 100 billion of capital in the next decade. We have earmarked 70 per cent of this investment for the energy transition space," Adani, the world's second-richest person, said.
Adani said the company would add 45 gigawatts of hybrid renewable power generation capacity and build three Giga factories to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines and hydrogen electrolyser.
"In addition to our existing 20 GW renewables portfolio, the new business will be augmented by another 45 GW of hybrid renewable power generation spread over 100,000 hectares of land - an area 1.4 times that of Singapore. This will lead to commercialization of three million metric tonne of green hydrogen," he said.
"Today, we can confidently state that we have a line of sight to first - become one of the least expensive producers of the green electron - and thereafter - the least expensive producer of green hydrogen," Adani further said.
Adani said the Indian data centre market was witnessing explosive growth.
"This sector consumes more energy than any other industry in the world and therefore our move to build green data centres is a game-changing differentiator," he said.
Further revealing his plans, Adani said he aimed to interconnect data centres through a series of terrestrial and globally linked undersea cables drawn at its ports and build consumer-based super-apps that would bring hundreds of millions of Adani Group's B2C consumers on one common digital platform.
"We also just finished building the world's largest sustainability cloud that already has a hundred of our solar and wind sites running on it - all off a single giant command and control centre that will soon be augmented by a global A-I lab," he said.
He further said that India was full of incredible opportunities and the "real India growth story is just starting". India, he said, was on the path to be the world's third largest economy by 2030. It recently became the fifth largest economy.
"Over next 25 years, India will achieve 100 per cent literacy levels, eradicate poverty, have a population with a median age of just 38 years and become a nation that attracts the highest foreign investment as it goes from a USD 3 trillion economy to USD 30 trillion economy," Adani said.
Speaking on China, Adani said the country, once the "champion of globalisation", was facing challenges.
"I anticipate that China - that was seen as the foremost champion of globalization - will feel increasingly isolated. Increasing nationalism, supply chain risk mitigation, and technology restrictions will have an impact," Adani said.