After Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), IT services giant HCLTech is venturing into data centre business. CEO and MD C Vijayakumar announced on July 13 that the company will be initially investing around Rs 3,500 crores into building data centre capacity of up to 50 MW.

This comes on the heels of the Noida-headquartered IT firm’s Sarvam AI investment of $150 million, underlining its ambitions of becoming a full-stack AI services and platform company.

Speaking at the company’s Q1FY27 earnings conference, Vijayakumar said, “Global data centre demand is expected to nearly triple by 2030, thanks to AI. In India, that growth is expected to happen at an even faster rate. Sovereign data requirements are increasingly mandating workloads for government, enterprises be delivered in the country. The business is shifting from physical infrastructure to higher value full stack solutions that will become a growth vector for HCLTech.”

“We will make a strategic investment of up to Rs 3,500 crores and with a potential to scale up to 50 MW capacity,” he added.

Vijayakumar added the company is already in talks with potential clients and close to closing the deal with a customer.

“The megawatts is just an anchor, the whole value is in delivering full stack AI services including data centres, GPUs, models, applications. The overall value creation is of a very different magnitude. We are also looking at leveraging it to deliver managed services and outcome-based contracts for global clients. Today token costs are a very important component of the overall delivery, we having our own capacity and solutions at fixed contracts will benefit global customers,” he said.