THE NEW ADANI AND EDGECONNEX JV AT WORK

AdaniConneX has just been selected by Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart, to set up its third national data center in Chennai.

Flipkart which is also a Walmart company, established a partnership with Adani Group for this project that further includes the construction of a 534,000 square foot fulfilment center (or warehouse) in Kalyan, near Mumbai, to strengthen its supply chain.

“At the Flipkart Group, we are focused on ensuring that our customers get access to a wide range of products made available by sellers across the country as we continuously innovate to drive greater affordability. Our logistics network and technology stack are instrumental in making this a reality,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, chief executive officer of Flipkart Group.

The development of the new Flipkart warehouse will be handled by Adani Logistics Ltd, which provides end-to-end logistics services, and is a subsidiary of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Ltd (APSEZ). As announced, this facility is designed to have the capacity to house 10 million units of sellers’ inventory.

“This broad-ranging partnership across our logistics and data center businesses is a unique business model, and we see this as a great opportunity to serve Flipkart’s physical as well as digital infrastructure needs,” said Karan Adani, chief executive officer of APSEZ.

Already, Flipkart has two data centers in Hyderabad and Chennai, while the third will be set up at the Chennai facility of AdaniConneX Pvt. Ltd, a new joint venture between EdgeConneX and Adani Enterprises Ltd that was launched in February 2021. The new data center is expected to further expand the footprint of private cloud deployments in India and strengthen Flipkart’s e-commerce business.

While the new data center is set to meet Flipkart’s growing infrastructure needs with a significant focus on security and data residency, the new warehouse or fulfilment center is expected to meet the demand for warehousing capacity due to a surge in online shopping over the last year.