Looking to capitalize on the increased presence of cloud giants and content providers, Bharti Airtel’s Nxtra Data is planning ten data centers across India, from which it will offer colocation, managed hosting, public and private cloud services.

According to the Economic Times, the data center arm of the country's largest mobile operator has already selected four locations in which to build facilities: Pune, Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata.

The first data center, in the Maharashtra city of Pune, will go live in February.

Airtel Business CEO Ajay Chitkara said Nxtra Data had established partnerships with “all the big cloud companies,” some of which already use Airtel's infrastructure, and was doing business with major content and application providers.

Airtel is also among the first in line to accommodate any government cloud infrastructure.

In 2016, the company signed a deal with CenturyLink – now part of Cyxtera Technologies – which offers its suite of managed IT services from Nxtra Data facilities across the country.

Additionally, Airtel reports having converted 120 of its core mobile sites into edge data centers in order to serve enterprise customers’ compute and storage requirements locally.

Nxtra Data currently operates ten facilities, including four in and around New Delhi, two in Mumbai, and others in Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Bengaluru and Pune.