L&T Vyoma signs MoU for ₹25,000 crore AI data centre at Dholera

In February 2026, L&T Vyoma signed an MoU with the Gujarat government for a ₹25,000 crore AI data centre at Dholera — a 250 MW hyperscale, AI-ready campus, signed during the India AI Impact Summit 2026, and the largest single private investment commitment the region has attracted. The agreement covered a feasibility study prior to construction — a detail this archive treats as load-bearing, not incidental.

What happened

The MoU was signed on the platform of the India AI Impact Summit, the global AI policy gathering — which tells you its intended audience was as much international as domestic. A ₹25,000 crore, 250 MW AI campus proposal attached to a national AI summit positions Dholera within India’s digital-sovereignty narrative: the compute layer of an AI economy, sited on a greenfield region purpose-built for power, cooling and fibre.

The scope as signed — MoU plus feasibility study — is the standard first instrument for infrastructure proposals of this size. It commits the parties to diligence, not construction. That distinction is preserved throughout our coverage because it is the difference between a milestone of intent and a milestone of delivery.

The background

Why would a hyperscale AI campus belong at Dholera at all? Because the region’s completed infrastructure reads like a data-centre requirements checklist. Trunk infrastructure in the ~22.5 sq km activation area — confirmed complete in the CM’s May 2025 review — includes grid-scale power (with the 300 MW solar park operating nearby and the broader Dholera solar build-out behind it), abundant water infrastructure, fibre and telco ducts delivered as part of the ICT trunk layer, and the ICCC smart-city instrumentation documented by PIB in November 2025.

AI-era data centres concentrate demands that strain legacy urban grids: tens of megawatts of continuous load, cooling water at scale, land in large contiguous parcels, and long-haul fibre. Greenfield regions with completed trunk layers — which Dholera has, alongside its semiconductor identity — are among the few places in India where such loads can be served without fighting an existing city for capacity.

The details

The February 2026 MoU initiated a fast-moving policy wave. In July 2026, Gujarat launched its first dedicated Data Centre Policy 2026-29, targeting ₹6 lakh crore in investment and 7.5 GW of capacity, with Dholera positioned as the anchor hub for hyperscale AI data centres and incentives on power, land and taxes. By September 2026, reported investment commitments had risen to approximately ₹17 lakh crore, with 20+ firms — Meta, Reliance and Adani among them — expressing interest, and coverage describing Dholera as the world’s largest planned data-centre city.

Within that wave, the L&T Vyoma proposal remained the largest single-project commitment at Dholera. L&T’s own pedigree is relevant: India’s most experienced heavy-engineering contractor is precisely the kind of sponsor whose feasibility studies tend to convert — the firm’s partnership history with the region runs back to the DICDL–L&T Skill Development Centre announced in April 2018.

The honest counterweights are preserved too: as of the policy’s launch, this was still a proposal-stage project with no construction commenced, and the ₹17 lakh crore figure represents commitments and interest, not commissioned capacity. Data-centre economics can also shift quickly — AI compute demand is real but its geography can move with policy and power availability.

Why it matters to Dholera:

Data centres are the power-and-fibre-hungry anchor tenants of the digital era. An AI-scale campus validates Dholera’s utility readiness and pulls an entire ecosystem of Cloud, AI and enterprise tenants around it. Hyperscale campuses are demand agglomerations: suppliers, service firms, connectivity providers and skilled technicians cluster around them, much as suppliers cluster around a fab — and Dholera’s vendor-park logic extends naturally to the digital layer.

The proposal also diversifies the region’s economic thesis. Through 2024–2025, Dholera’s story was single-industry: the semiconductor fab. A ₹25,000 crore digital commitment — arriving before the fab’s first wafer — demonstrated that the region’s infrastructure could price for more than one industry, reducing concentration risk for every other investor.

There is a synergy reading as well: chip fabrication and AI compute are the two capital-intensive layers of the same technology stack, and a region hosting both can market a vertically integrated story — silicon designed and fabricated within the same infrastructure footprint that hosts the compute consuming it.

The bigger picture

February 2026 was a two-front month for Dholera: the expressway opened for public testing (27 February) and the data-centre MoU landed — physical connectivity and digital-scale ambition in the same weeks, followed within weeks by the landmark ten-scheme TP gazette batch (30 March) expanding the operative land map that such projects ultimately draw on.

Label — important: this remains a proposal/MoU, not an operational facility. We track it at ⚪/🟠 until construction and commissioning evidence appears — the standing discipline for every MoU-class entry in this feed, alongside our ground-reality chapter.

Related chapter: Ch. 18 — Investment & economic architecture →