FILE PHOTO: Employees of HCLTech walk inside the office premises on the outskirts of Lucknow, India, March 20, 2024. REUTERS/Pawan Kumar/File Photo
| Photo Credit:
Noida-based HCLTech on Monday said its board has approved an investment of up to ₹3,500 crore to set up 50 MW data centres across India. The IT services major noted that the expansion is driven by enterprises rapidly transitioning from legacy physical infrastructure to high-value, AI-ready full-stack solutions.“We will combine our capabilities across AI data centre design, as well as our software portfolio with the new AI data centre business for this. In this regard, we will make a strategic investment, up to ₹3,500 crore, and with the potential to scale to 50 MW of capacity,” C Vijayakumar, MD & CEO, HCLTech, said while announcing the quarterly results here.He said HCLTech was in conversation with several clients and was “very close” to establishing its first client with some committed capacity.“The most important element here is, while it is AI data centre business, we are playing fundamentally a different game... for us, the MW is just the anchor. Our whole value is in delivering full stack AI services, which means it’s data centre, the GPUs, the models and the applications that we will deliver on top of it. So, the overall value creation is significantly of a very different magnitude, and that’s really what we want to play,” he said.rapid growth pathHCLTech is also looking at leveraging data centres for delivering managed services and outcome-based contracts for global clients because, today, token costs are a very important component of the overall delivery, he added.According to the company, India’s data centre ecosystem is on a rapid growth trajectory, driven by strong demand from a vibrant digital economy, data localisation, and critical infrastructure. Data centre capacity is expected to grow to 5-7 GW by 2030 from the current 1.8 GW, with a significant part of that growth in AI data centres.Q1 net & dividendHCLTech reported a consolidated net profit of ₹4,624 crore for the first quarter ended June 30 — a year-on-year growth of 20.32 per cent.Consolidated revenue from operations rose 14 per cent to ₹34,579 crore. The board declared an interim dividend of ₹12 per equity share of ₹2 each for 2026-27.Published on July 13, 2026
