Cyclone Arnab hits Indian coast slated for $15 billion data center

Cyclone Arnab struck the stretch of India's coastline Wednesday where Google, Adani and Airtel plan to invest $15 billion in a hyperscale data center. The storm killed three people in eastern Andhra Pradesh state, damaged homes and infrastructure, and inundated roughly 200,000 acres of cropland, according to state authorities. Heavy rainfall remained the biggest threat inland as the storm weakened.

Full damage estimates will likely take days or weeks to calculate. But the storm's landfall on a coast dense with early-stage data center construction shows how extreme weather threatens both existing livelihoods and the infrastructure meant to drive future growth, climate experts said.

Why did Arnab grow so powerful?

Unusually high temperatures across the Bay of Bengal, an already warm atmosphere and heat stored below the surface fueled the storm, according to K.J. Ramesh, a former director general of the Indian Meteorological Department.

"A warmer atmosphere can also hold more moisture, increasing the potential for intense rainfall," Ramesh said.

The warm waters also helped the storm strengthen rapidly, according to Akshay Deoras, a weather expert at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Cyclones are part of natural weather patterns, he said, but warming from human-caused climate change can amplify their rainfall.

The storm follows India's weakest southwest monsoon since 2015. A strong El Niño combined with an already warming climate produced sparse rainfall from June through September, according to weather experts. Districts across several Indian states have declared droughts, and southern and eastern India posted particularly large deficits. Intense downpours offer little relief when rain falls unevenly: heavy rainfall can run off hardened, dry ground rather than soak in.

How large is the economic damage?

India experienced extreme weather on 360 days in 2025 alone, with 4,421 people killed and 17.41 million hectares (43.21 million acres) of cropland affected, according to the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment. India ranks among the top 10 most vulnerable countries to climate impacts and lost $170 billion in the three decades from 1995 to 2024, according to the think tank Germanwatch's Climate Risk Index.

Heat waves cut the productivity of factory and outdoor workers, while floods and cyclones interrupt transport, electricity and logistics, said Anjal Prakash, a public policy professor at Flame University in Pune. These indirect costs are easily overlooked in early assessments focused on crops, homes and roads, he said.

"Households often bear the earliest and harshest losses through damaged homes, destroyed assets and lost wages," Prakash said. Many farmers, informal workers and small enterprises lack insurance or savings, he said, and governments then face reconstruction bills that can squeeze spending on schools, healthcare, transport and industrial capacity.

Regional losses compound the picture. Pakistan's 2022 floods killed more than 1,730 people and caused over $30 billion in damage and economic losses, according to a government-led assessment. Nepal's floods in August this year are estimated to have caused over $4 billion in damage, along with thousands of deaths.

"The biggest blind spot is the cascading disruptions," Prakash said. A flooded road or damaged substation can interrupt factories, supply chains and services far beyond the disaster zone, he said.

What does this mean for the data center build-out?

Visakhapatnam, the city in the path of Arnab's heavy rains, is where Google, Adani and Airtel plan their $15 billion hyperscale data center. A 2025 assessment by climate-risk analytics firm XDI of 228 Indian data centers projected that more than 1-in-10 would face high risks of damage from climate change by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario. The analysis found that structural adaptations could substantially reduce those risks.

These facilities face overlapping threats from flooding, heat, unreliable electricity and water scarcity, Prakash said. Planning based on historical weather can underestimate how climate change is raising the frequency of extremes. He called for infrastructure plans that account for future climate conditions, including stronger electricity grids, flood-proofed roads and housing, and better crop insurance. Businesses need continuity plans covering several failures at once, such as a cyclone followed by power cuts and transport disruption.

Deoras said forecasting has improved for large weather systems, but local thunderstorms and flash floods remain hard to predict, leaving dangerous gaps in protection.

Prakash said India and its South Asian neighbors should seek predictable, grant-based adaptation finance and simpler access to United Nations loss-and-damage funding at the global climate talks in Turkey next month. "Climate finance must reach the frontline communities before losses become irreversible," he said.

For the companies pouring billions into India's coastal computing capacity, Arnab is a working demonstration that the climate risk assessments of 2025 describe the operating conditions of the 2030s.