Technology
The 20MW Tier-3 data center campus, built in 5MW blocks
NICPL's primary deployment model is a standardized 5MW building block. One block stands alone as a Tier-3 site; four blocks in sequence form a 20MW campus — the same reference design repeated rather than a bespoke build re-engineered at every location. This page covers how that platform is actually built: cooling, power, and monitoring. See Containerized Edge for the smaller, faster-to-site product line, or TIA-942 vs Uptime for how the certification itself works.
Phased by design, not phased by accident
Every site starts as a single 5MW block and scales in place toward a 20MW campus, so capital deploys against real, contracted demand instead of a single all-at-once build. Each block is engineered to the same reference design — roughly 80% standardized across every site, with the remaining 20% adapted for local soil, seismic zone, and climate conditions — so quality and delivery timelines stay predictable whether it's the first site or the hundredth.
- 20MW maximum per site, built as four 5MW modules for phased CapEx and faster go-live.
- Modules engineered to support mixed rack densities, deployed on demand to avoid stranded capacity.
- Efficiency designed into the platform — cooling, energy, and automation together to maximise PUE.
Cooling, matched to density — with zero water wastage
Rather than one cooling approach for the whole facility, each campus is zoned by rack density and given the right technology for that band — avoiding the cost of over-cooling low-density racks or the risk of under-cooling high-density ones. Every band is air-cooled or closed-loop liquid-cooled: no evaporative towers and no water-based heat rejection anywhere in the design, so cooling consumes zero process water at any density.
5kW – 25kW — Air-Cooled
Standard CRAC/CRAH air-cooled racks, extended toward the top of this band with in-row RDHx (rear-door heat exchangers) for tighter thermal control without a chilled-water retrofit.
25kW – 135kW — Hybrid Cooling
Direct-to-chip cooling, closed-loop liquid cooling, or a mix — matched to the workload rather than one-size-fits-all. Immersion cooling is provisioned for Built-to-Suit deployments at the top of this range.
Why zero evaporative cooling means low WUE
Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) measures liters of water consumed per kWh of IT energy delivered — counting only water that actually leaves the site, through evaporation or discharge, not water circulating in a sealed loop. Facilities that rely on evaporative cooling towers average around 1.9 L/kWh, and even the best-run evaporative sites land at 0.8–1.2 L/kWh. Because every NICPL band is air-cooled (DX/refrigerant-based) or closed-loop liquid-cooled — never evaporative — the design target sits well below 0.05 L/kWh: a more than 20x improvement over the industry average, and already inside the sub-0.5 L/kWh threshold an increasing share of enterprise procurement now specifies as a contractual requirement.
~1.9 L/kWh
Industry-average WUE across evaporative-cooled facilities
0.8–1.2 L/kWh
Best-in-class evaporative facilities, with high cycles of concentration
<0.05 L/kWh
NICPL's target — the range closed-loop, zero-evaporative designs consistently achieve
Power, designed for resilience
NICPL builds every grid interconnection to the same rigor a TIA-942 Rated-3 design demands: a dedicated on-site substation, redundant switching, and power-quality equipment sized for continuous, concurrently maintainable operation — not just a service transformer and a generator.
Grid tie-in via on-site substation
Each site interconnects to the grid through its own on-site substation, built on Gas Insulated Switchgear (GIS) and other current-generation switching technology, with smart automation systems built in rather than bolted on.
Transient Voltage Protection (TVP)
TVP transformers absorb grid-side surges and switching transients before they reach IT load — protection the utility feed alone can’t guarantee.
Real-time SCADA & digital monitoring
Every stage of the power path, from the substation to the rack, is visible on a real-time SCADA layer — monitored continuously, not just metered after the fact.
STATCOM & harmonic filters
Static synchronous compensators (STATCOM) and harmonic filters keep power quality within tolerance under variable renewable and IT load, protecting both the site and the upstream grid.
Day-1 renewable integration
Hybrid solar and storage designed into every site from initial commissioning, not retrofitted later.
BESS, ATS & DG backup chain
A battery buffer smooths renewable and grid supply and rides through short outages; an automatic transfer switch (ATS) then brings diesel-generator backup online for extended outages, with no interruption to supply.
Monitoring & automation
Unified DCIM + EMS
Rack power, temperature, and utilization; UPS/battery health; cooling and fire status; energy consumption and PUE — on one platform, not siloed tools.
Remote, multi-site dashboard
Mobile and cloud access to real-time status and historical trending across every NICPL site, not just the one you happen to be standing in.
PUE optimisation stack
Cooling efficiency, smart energy management, and automation working together — not just measured, but actively managed toward a lower number.
Environmental monitoring: hardwired IIoT sensors
Every hall runs a dedicated environmental sensor layer — hardwired, not wireless. It's a small installation overhead in exchange for a mission-critical guarantee: no battery-replacement cycles, no RF interference, and no dropped readings at the moment they matter most. Sensors feed into rack PDUs, rack controllers, inline meters, branch-circuit monitors, and gateway devices, all landing in the same unified DCIM + EMS platform above — not a patchwork of point sensors nobody owns.
Temperature
Rack inlet and outlet temperature at multiple points per rack, held inside ASHRAE-recommended ranges (18°C–27°C / 65°F–80°F).
Humidity
Relative humidity monitored per row, held inside the 40–60% RH band that protects against both static discharge and condensation.
Differential pressure
Cold-aisle/hot-aisle and containment pressure, plus underfloor plenum pressure, to catch air leaks before they show up as a hot spot.
Airflow
Air velocity across cold-aisle, hot-aisle, and underfloor plenum zones, tied directly into cooling control rather than measured in isolation.
Water leak detection
Leak-sense cable and point sensors beneath cooling units and raised-floor zones, catching condensation or a pipe failure before it reaches IT load.
Vibration
Monitored at the rack, since sustained vibration degrades rotating media and loosens connections over time.
Door / access contact
Per-cabinet contact closures reporting open/closed state — physical security folded into the same monitoring layer, not a separate system.
Air quality
Gaseous contaminant and particulate levels, tracked against manufacturer warranty limits for the IT equipment in the hall.
Density, not just presence, is what makes the readings trustworthy: no fewer than six temperature sensors per rack — top, middle, and bottom, front and back — plus roughly one humidity sensor for every five racks, so a hot spot shows up as a specific rack and elevation, not a room-level average.
Physical security & pest control
Cable and pipe penetrations are a documented industry risk — a single severed fiber or damaged cable from rodent intrusion can take down connectivity for hours. NICPL closes that gap as a standard build spec, not an afterthought bolted on after an incident.
Sealed cable & pipe entries
Every cable and pipe penetration is closed with a mechanical sealing system — the same barrier that protects against fire and water ingress also closes off the entry points rodents and pests exploit.
Perimeter exclusion
Door sweeps, sealed expansion joints, screened vents, and secured loading-dock and roof access — hardened at the points pests most commonly enter a facility.
Integrated Pest Management (IPM)
Inspection, monitoring, and sanitation come first; pesticide application is a last resort, not a routine — the standard approach for a mission-critical facility.
Scheduled inspection cadence
Regular inspection of mechanical rooms, cable pathways, and exterior generator yards, with digital reporting to support audit and compliance requirements.
Built for resilience and performance
Tier 3
Concurrently maintainable, N+1 redundancy
99.982%
Availability — no more than ~1.6 hours downtime/year
72 hrs
Continued operation following a grid outage
Every NICPL campus targets Tier 3, TIA-942 certification — Design and Constructed Facility. See the full TIA-942 vs Uptime comparison for how that compares to the Uptime Institute's Tier system. Every site also targets MeitY empanelment and ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018, and 20000 — see the compliance detail on the Government & PSU and Enterprise Colocation pages.
OCP Ready™: what facility readiness requires
Halls are also built to OCP Ready™ v1 Data Center Site criteria — the Open Compute Project's facility readiness matrix, assessed against an "Acceptable" and an "Optimum" parameter for each requirement, so open, vendor-neutral Open Rack hardware drops in without facility rework. A fully populated Open Rack ranges from an "Acceptable" profile (up to 500kg, 6.6kW IT load) to an "Optimum" profile (up to 1,500kg, 36kW IT load) — matching the top of NICPL's own 25kW–135kW hybrid-cooling band.
No NICPL site currently holds formal OCP Ready™ certification — no site has been completed yet. Every campus in the pipeline is being designed and built to meet OCP Ready v1 Data Center Site criteria from the outset, with certification pursued as each site reaches completion. OCP Ready™ is a trademark of the Open Compute Project Foundation, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, NICPL.
Data center access
Loading-dock access, corridor clearances, and ramp gradients engineered for a fully populated Open Rack — up to 1,500kg — not just a server chassis.
IT technical space (white space)
Rack and pod geometry, and aisle spacing, planned for the airflow an Open Rack deployment actually needs.
Electrical systems
Rack circuits sized from 3-phase 16A up to 3-phase 32A, with 1N and 2N architecture options and IEC/NEMA receptacle compatibility, so battery-backed Open Racks and traditional IT gear can share a hall.
Airflow & containment
Front-to-back rack airflow with hot-aisle or cold-aisle containment — the same segregation discipline used across every NICPL hall, whatever the rack format.
Load density & environment
Distributed load density support well beyond 12kW per rack, with supply-air temperature and humidity held inside ASHRAE TC 9.9 ranges.
Telecom cabling & pathways
Structured cabling infrastructure, pathways, and spaces planned for high-density connectivity from day one, not added after the racks land.
Built to a national green-building standard
Certification for a NICPL campus doesn't stop at the data hall. Every building on site targets Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) Gold certification or better — the same standard CII's IGBC uses to rate sustainable construction nationwide, applied consistently across the network rather than one flagship site.
No NICPL site currently holds an IGBC rating — no site has been completed yet. IGBC is a registered trademark of the Indian Green Building Council, a part of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, NICPL.
Certified
Entry-level recognition for meeting the IGBC rating system’s baseline requirements.
Silver
A step above baseline on the same site, water, energy, materials, and indoor-environment criteria.
Gold
NICPL’s floor for every building — not just the data hall — across every site in the network.
Platinum / Super Platinum
The highest tiers on the IGBC scale; where a site’s design supports it, NICPL targets above Gold.
What an IGBC rating actually assesses
Sustainable site planning
Site selection, land use, and construction-phase practices that limit environmental disruption before the building is even occupied.
Water efficiency
Reduced potable-water demand through efficient fixtures, and rainwater/wastewater management on site.
Energy efficiency
Building-envelope and systems design that cuts energy demand — assessed alongside, not instead of, the facility’s PUE.
Materials & resources
Preference for lower-impact, responsibly sourced building materials over the construction lifecycle.
Indoor environmental quality
Air quality, lighting, and comfort standards for everyone who works in and around the facility, not just the data hall.
Innovation
Credit for design or operational practices that go beyond the standard rating criteria.