HCLTech will invest up to Rs 3,500 crore to build an AI data centre business with the potential to scale to 50 megawatts (MW) of capacity as part of its strategy to expand its full-stack artificial intelligence (AI) offerings, the company's chief executive officer, C Vijayakumar, said during the company's first-quarter earnings press conference.
The company said the investment is aimed at building AI-ready infrastructure that combines data centre design, cloud operations, DevOps capabilities and its software portfolio to deliver AI services for enterprises and governments.
"We will make a strategic investment up to rupees 3,500 crores and with the potential to scale to 50 megawatts of capacity," Vijayakumar said.
He said the company expects global demand for data centres to nearly triple by 2030, driven by AI, while growth in India is expected to be faster. He added that increasing sovereign data requirements are creating demand for in-country AI infrastructure for governments, enterprises and global consumer platforms.
According to Vijayakumar, the company is in discussions with several customers and is close to securing its first client with committed capacity. He said the data centre itself would not be the company's primary offering.
"Normally, you look at this data center capacity in megawatts and gigawatts and that becomes the product, and that's for infrastructure companies. For us, the megawatt is just the anchor. Our whole value is in delivering full stack AI services," he said.
The company plans to provide data centre infrastructure, graphics processing units (GPUs), AI models and enterprise applications as part of the offering. It also intends to use the facilities to support managed services and outcome-based contracts for global clients by using its own computing capacity.
Explaining the shift into a business that requires physical infrastructure, Vijayakumar said AI had changed the role of data centres in enterprise technology.
"AI has made computer and data centre capacity very scarce. And data center capacity and compute has become the strategic bottleneck in the entire value chain," he said. "We are making a targeted asset heavy move precisely to grow an asset light services engine in the AI era."
The investment will be funded through a combination of debt and equity, and may include other partners, whose details will be announced later, the company said.