India ticks all the boxes for long-term investors: CPPIB

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CPP Investments sees data centres, infrastructure and real estate as key opportunities in India as the country’s economic growth, expanding middle class and digital economy drive demand for new assets.

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Canada Pension Plan Investment Board sees data centres, infrastructure and real estate among major investment opportunities in India, both through direct and indirect routes, even as it remains too early to decide the winners and losers in the AI race, a senior company executive said.

After the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), the sovereign wealth fund of the Abu Dhabi government with assets of around $90-100 billion, and Singapore’s Temasek, which manages around $42 billion in India, CPP Investments is among the largest foreign institutional investors in the country.

Growing exposure

The firm has invested around C$33.7 billion ($24.5 billion or ₹2.25 trillion) in the Indian market, with its net assets in India reaching an all-time high as of 30 June. Since opening its Mumbai office in 2015, CPP Investments’ net assets in India have grown nearly 17-fold, from ₹1.76 trillion a year earlier and ₹1.85 trillion as of 31 March 2026, the firm said.

“Asia is a significant portion of our portfolio. It is just below 25% of our overall portfolio,” Manroop Jhooty, senior managing director and head of Total Fund Management, CPP Investments, told Mint. “It's been roughly around those levels for at least the past couple of years. India, within that, is our third largest contributor (in Asia in terms of net assets), just behind the other two large economies, and so we've always been active in Asia.”

CPP Investments sees data centres, infrastructure and real estate as key opportunities in India as the country’s economic growth, expanding middle class and digital economy drive demand for new assets.

“When we look from the lens of really long term investor, India has a lot of positives. It's expected to have significant contributions to global growth over the long term. It has positive demographics relative to other geographies, and then on top of that, it has a continually growing middle class,” Jhooty said. “And when you add those elements together, it has everything that you would want to look for from a global investor like ourselves. It ticks all the boxes when you think about long-term investing.”

CPPIB, besides investing directly in companies, also invests in private equity funds, both global and domestic. Hence, its India exposure is spread across direct as well as indirect investments.

As of the first quarter of FY27, it has committed $400 million to KKR Asian Fund V, a private equity fund focused on upper mid-market and large-cap buyout investments across Asia Pacific, invested $50 million to global venture capital Accel Core, which will invest in Accel’s core technology sectors that is expected to include artificial intelligence, security, developer tools, fintech, defence and software.

It has also formed a strategic partnership with CtrlS Datacenters Ltd., a leading data centre operator in India. As part of the partnership, CPP will invest C$588 million for an 8.2% stake in the company and has allocated up to C$441 million for a 48% stake in a joint venture to develop hyperscale data centre campuses across India.

“There is a view that is emerging amongst a lot of the hyperscalers is that India offers one of the lowest total cost of ownership (globally), and that's attractive on a global basis, and that is attracting the global level workloads, AI workloads, etc. So, still early days, but the momentum is real,” said Hari Krishna V., managing director, India office head, and head of real estate India at CPP Investments.

CPPIB is betting big on data centres as an investment opportunity in India. “Certainly, we would like to grow our relationship with CtrlS, and that is a conversation that we are having with them,” Hari added.

Other investments in the country include the National Stock Exchange of India Ltd, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Flipkart, Hexaware Technologies, real estate developer RMZ Corp., and industrial and logistics real estate developer IndoSpace, Mint reported in October.

Amid growing concerns that India is lagging behind the US and China in AI, Jhooty feels it's too early to determine the winners.

“If you take a step back, without speaking specifically to the dynamics as it relates to geographies, I think it's very early days when it comes to AI, and it's very difficult at this point in time to say how AI is going to develop, how it's going to diffuse into applications, into markets, who the winners and losers are going to be,” Jhooty said.

CPP Investments has also been realizing investments from its India portfolio in recent months. Notable exits include the sale of its stake in a real-estate joint venture with Phoenix Mills, a full exit from One Paramount and an exit from listed logistics services provider Delhivery.

About the Author

Sneha Shah is the editor for deals and startups at Mint. Starting off her career in India’s financial capital as a cub reporter for the Mid-day newspaper in the mid-2000s, she later moved on to decode balance sheets and follow the money trail for some of the leading pink publications in the country. She has been covering India’s deals ecosystem for nearly two decades now, closely tracking private- and public-market funding, startups, private equity, venture capital, and investment banking. From breaking some of the biggest deal stories of the past to doing some incisive deep-dives into the latest trends and turnarounds in the industry, she has witnessed the phenomenal growth and transformation of the country’s investment ecosystem from really close quarters. A graduate in journalism, she has worked with The Economic Times, Financial Chronicle, VCCircle and Mid-Day before starting her second stint at Mint in 2022. As a keen observer of India’s startups ecosystem, she aspires to write a book some day, chronicling some of the most inspiring stories the industry has seen so far in its remarkable journey.

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