Dholera, the data-centre city
Gujarat's first Data Centre Policy names Dholera the primary location. Here is what is real, and the water question nobody should skip.
Gujarat's Viksit Data Centre Policy 2026-29, launched on 9 July 2026, targets over Rs 6 lakh crore of investment and 7.5 GW of capacity across the state, and names Dholera the primary location. It classifies data centres as an essential service and makes the Department of Science and Technology the nodal department. These are state-wide targets, not capital committed to Dholera.
The anchor that is actually signed
Larsen & Toubro-Vyoma's Dholera AI data-centre agreement is government-confirmed (newsonair, 20 February 2026), reported at around 250 MW. A larger Tillman Global figure circulating in the press appears conflated with a separate Andhra Pradesh project, so we do not headline it.
Green power
The policy mandates that data centres source at least 51% of electricity from green energy. That ties the story to the Dholera solar park, where 300 MW of a 1,000 MW Phase-I is commissioned against a 5,000 MW target.
The water constraint, stated plainly
Data centres need cooling water. Dholera's current desalination capacity is about 20 MLD, enough only for the Activation Area. DICDL issued a tender on 9 July 2026 to appoint consultants for a much larger 200 MLD seawater desalination plant, and officials say the final SIR-wide water requirement is still unknown. The pace of desalination build-out is a real gating factor, not a footnote.
Data-centre deep dives
- Gujarat Data Centre Policy 2026-29
- L&T-Vyoma AI data centre
- Water and desalination
- The 51% green-power mandate
How this page is sourced
Everything on this site is held to one standard so you can trust it enough to act on. Every figure is tagged by where it comes from: green for government or official sources, amber for national or trade press, and red for broker or unverified claims, which we flag rather than repeat as fact. Every figure carries a date, because Dholera moves and a number that was right last year may not hold now. Anything framed as a future event, an opening, a first chip, a completion, stays labelled as a target until a government source confirms it happened. We do not sell plots, we do not publish invented reviews or registration numbers, and where a fact is not reliably available we say so instead of guessing. The full method and the primary sources are on the sources and methodology page.
Read the tags as a confidence meter. A green figure is something you can plan against today. An amber figure is credible but worth confirming before you build a decision on it. A red figure is a claim we are showing you so that you can recognise it, not one we stand behind. When two sources disagree, we say so and show the more authoritative one rather than averaging them into a number that is nobody's actual figure. The point of all of this is simple: you should be able to act on what you read here, and check any of it yourself, without wondering whether a number was quietly invented to make the picture look better than it is.