Shares of Anant Raj Ltd surged 5% and hit a 52-week high of Rs 449.40 on 18 June after the company announced signing an Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Orange Business Services India Technology, which is a business services subsidiary of Orange S.A.

As a part of this MoU, Orange Business Services India Technology will design, build, operate services for Anant Raj arm’s (ARC) cloud platform. The agreement will ensure setting up servers for its own needs at the ARC data centre and will also support, promote, and sell ARC’s colocation data centre and cloud platform services to its existing and prospective customers under mutually agreed terms and conditions.

Anant Raj initiated its data centre business in September last year, planning to convert three commercial projects into data centres with a capacity of nearly 300 megawatt (MW). The company also announced plans to invest Rs 10,000 crore over four to five years, according to managing director Amit Sarin in an interview with Moneycontrol.

At the start of operations in September, constructing a 1 MW data centre typically costs around Rs 55 crore. However, since Anant Raj owns the land, the cost could be reduced to about Rs 25 crore per MW. Power is a critical factor for data centre customers who need sufficient electricity to run thousands of servers and associated IT hardware.

The Indian data centre market is growing at a compounded annual growth rate of about 40% and is expected to attract around $5 billion in investments by 2025, according to a report by Avendus Capital.

At 2:31 pm, the shares of Anant Raj were trading 4.70% higher at Rs 444.45 on NSE.