Saw on the old forum that there were plans to open a region in Chennai, India. I live in Chennai, coincidentally. Need any help? I build my own gaming PCs, server racks can’t be that hard 
On a more general note, is there any scope for a volunteer/freelancer workforce to establish regions in parts of the world that core team wouldn’t be able to access otherwise?
That’s an interesting question and I am intrigued.
How hard is it to get server hardware in Chennai? Is there a place you’d order rack servers from? I’d definitely like to see if we can build boxes to our spec somehow.
There’s a street called Richie Street that has the electronics markets, and there’s always Amazon.in. We build servers at work as well, I can ask the hardware department where they source stuff. Are you looking for lots of redundant commodity hardware or Xeon dual CPU type setups? If you can send me a spec I can look into it.
I think buying and building the servers is the easy part, do you have deal with a colo here? The undersea fiber cables all land about 20 mins away from me, so this is the right place—I’ve seen the buildings that house the interchange, but I’ve never been inside. The folks who rent rack space might also handle building the servers.
EDIT: Dell also operates in India, so that ought to be straightforward https://www.dell.com/en-in/work/shop/poweredge-rack-servers/sf/poweredge-rack-servers?~ck=bt
Cursory search throws up https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/india/chennai — if you ask them for a quote tell them you want it in “Bharati Airtel Santhome” location, that’s really close by.
Yeah, they seem to be the right choice, everyone, including Netlifx, Google, Fastly, all have their setups there. https://www.de-cix.in/connected-networks
Mumbai would be a better choice because of proximity to the AWS region there, but it seems crowded and you’d have to find someone there. If you make a deal with the Chennai datacenter I’m happy to build the boxes and go plug them in, and do maintenance.
Found a local equipment provider here https://www.eagle.in — they seem to know what they’re doing. I imagine you’ll want to check all the boxes here https://www.eagle.in/product/hpe-proliant-dl380-gen10-2u-rack-server-rs-233640-onwards/ ?