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New Delhi, India - February 22, 2026 - The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has commissioned a new high-security data center in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, designed to safeguard India’s financial infrastructure against seismic risks, cyberattacks, and potential cross-border disruptions.
The greenfield facility has been deliberately located in eastern India, away from sensitive border regions and high-seismic-intensity zones, to ensure continuity of core banking and payment operations during natural disasters or national emergencies. The site will function as a disaster-resilient hub supporting critical central banking services, including currency management, payment settlement systems, and supervisory data processing.
Built on an approximately 18-acre campus in the Info Valley-II technology zone in Khordha district, the center incorporates multi-layered physical and cyber protection, redundancy architecture, and real-time replication capabilities. Officials said the facility is engineered for uninterrupted operation and meets the highest availability standards for mission-critical infrastructure.
The new installation complements the RBI’s primary data center in Navi Mumbai and forms part of a broader strategy to geographically distribute financial computing infrastructure. By separating core systems across distant regions, the central bank aims to ensure that national payment rails and regulatory platforms remain operational even during large-scale outages or coordinated cyber incidents.
The project also reflects India’s push toward data sovereignty in financial services as digital transactions increasingly underpin the economy. With real-time payments and electronic settlement volumes expanding rapidly, central banking infrastructure is being treated as national critical infrastructure rather than conventional IT support systems.
Industry analysts say central banks worldwide are adopting distributed architectures to strengthen resilience against climate risks, cyber warfare, and geopolitical shocks. The RBI’s move aligns India with global best practices in financial infrastructure continuity planning, where operational survivability is prioritized alongside cybersecurity.
Beyond redundancy, the Odisha facility is expected to improve processing stability during peak transaction periods and support future expansion of digital financial services. As payment ecosystems scale and financial networks become more interconnected, authorities view geographically diversified data centers as essential to maintaining trust in national monetary systems.
The new site marks a structural shift in how India designs financial infrastructure, from single-region dependence toward resilient, multi-location operational continuity, ensuring the country’s banking backbone remains functional under extreme scenarios.
