Published: 12:24 AM, 07 June 2026
Bangladesh-born billionaire behind India's latest $30 bn data centre bet
Blackstone-backed data center giant AirTrunk has laid out a massive plan to invest more than $30 billion (Rs 3 lakh crore) in India by 2030. Aiming to develop over 5 GW of data centre capacity, the move positions the Asia-Pacific hyperscale operator at the absolute centre of India's artificial intelligence infrastructure boom.
At the helm of this monumental expansion is Robin Khuda, a Bangladesh-born Australian entrepreneur whose meteoric rise has caught the attention of global markets.
Khuda, who was named The Australian Financial Review's Business Person of the Year for 2023, is a self-made billionaire who built a majority of his fortune via constructing data centres. As of today, Khuda boasts a net worth of $2.1 billion according to Forbes.
The proposed investment, backed by Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, is among the largest digital infrastructure programmes currently under consideration in the country. Few of the larger investments that centred around building data centres in India come from entities like the Adani Group, which has proposed an investment of $100 billion into building renewable data centres in India.
AirTrunk said the project will span multiple states and union territories and support the next wave of cloud and artificial intelligence demand. The announcement follows AirTrunk's entry into India in April 2026 through the acquisition of Lumina CloudInfra. That deal gave the company an initial 600 MW development pipeline across Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad.
The scale is already visible in Maharashtra. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had earlier said that a letter of intent had been exchanged for land allotment at the Raigad Pen Growth Centre for a proposed 3 GW data centre project, involving an investment of around Rs 2 lakh crore.
Born and raised in Dhaka, Khuda moved to Australia in 1997 and enrolled at the University of Technology Sydney to study accounting. He later completed an MBA from Manchester Business School and obtained professional accounting qualifications. His route to hyperscale infrastructure was not a conventional tech billionaire story.
He worked across technology, telecom and cloud-related roles, including at Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand, before becoming chief financial officer at PIPE Networks - where he was involved in finance, strategy and M&A, including the company's merger with TPG Telecom. He then joined data centre company NEXTDC, working closely with investors as the sector began attracting wider institutional attention.
