HCLTech, India’s third-largest IT services company, said on Monday it would invest up to Rs 3,500 crore to build an AI data centre business, foraying into physical infrastructure as it seeks to capture rising demand for AI compute capacity in India and globally.
The Noida-based company said the investment could scale up to 50 megawatts of capacity, as it looks to combine data centre infrastructure with its software and services portfolio to offer a “full-stack” AI offering to enterprise and government clients.
“We are starting with the initial investment of Rs 3,500 crore, but our bigger vision is to grow it to 50 megawatts capacity,” Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director C. Vijayakumar told reporters during post-quarterly earnings press conference.
Vijayakumar said the company was in advanced talks with potential clients. “We are in conversation with several clients and we are very close to establishing our first client with some committed capacity,” he said.
This an interesting shift for HCLTech, which has historically pursued an “asset-light” services model and had ruled out entering the capital-intensive data centre business as recently as last year. Vijayakumar defended the decision, saying it was a targeted departure rather than a change in strategy.
“We are not really departing from our core business model of remaining asset light,” he said. “AI has made compute and data centre capacity very scarce; and data centre capacity and compute has become the strategic bottleneck in the entire value chain.”
He added that the company was “making a targeted asset heavy move precisely to grow an asset light services engine in the AI era.”
Full-Stack AI Strategy And Funding Plans
Vijayakumar said the data centre investment would be funded through a combination of debt and equity, and that additional partners could join the venture, to be disclosed later. He declined to name specific technology or capital partners.
The executive said the business would go beyond simply leasing out compute capacity. “Our whole value is in delivering full stack AI services, which means it’s data centre, it’s the GPUs, it’s the models, it’s the applications that we will deliver on top of it,” he said.
He added that the facility would also be used to support the company’s own managed services contracts, helping HCLTech control costs tied to AI token consumption. “Token costs are a very important component of the overall delivery,” Vijayakumar said, adding that owning proprietary capacity gave the company “a very big advantage” in delivering fixed-price and outcome-based contracts to global clients.
The data centre push comes alongside a separate USD 151 million strategic investment in Sarvam, a sovereign AI company, announced last month. Vijayakumar said the two moves were connected, aimed at capturing what he estimated to be a more than USD 20 billion AI opportunity in India across enterprises and government.
Q1 Results and Outlook
The announcements were made alongside HCLTech’s first-quarter results for fiscal year 2027, in which the company reported revenue of Rs 34,579 crore, up 1.8 per cent sequentially, and an operating margin of 16.9 per cent. The company posted net new bookings of USD 2.4 billion for the quarter, its highest-ever first-quarter figure, excluding a separate “mega deal” signed with a Global 50 client in early July.
HCLTech maintained its full-year revenue growth guidance of 1-4 per cent at the company level and margin guidance of 17.5-18.5 per cent in constant currency, saying the outlook did not include contributions from recent acquisitions, including its newly completed purchase of JasperSoft. |
