HCLTech, country’s third largest IT services company, on Friday announced its plans to set up its first AI Data Center in the upcoming Odisha Sovereign AI Park in partnership with Sarvam and the Government of Odisha.“The planned capital outlay for the project will be Rs 14,257 crores, including financial assistance from the Government of Odisha,” HCLTech said in a regulatory filing.The investment will boost India’s sovereign AI play and local developer ecosystem by leveraging HCLTech’s full-stack AI capabilities and Sarvam’s foundation models to offer sector-specific AI applications to private and public sector enterprises and address the government’s sovereignty needs, the filing said adding that it will also contribute to delivery of multi-lingual AI based services to the last mile.The data center announcement comes just over a month after the Noida-headquartered IT major announced its investment plans of $150 million as the lead strategic investor in Sarvam’s latest Series B funding round of $234 million on June 15.HCLTech’s chief executive and managing director C Vijayakumar said this is an important milestone in the firm’s full-stack AI play. “…and will enable us to serve the large demand for sovereign AI solutions and unlock the scale of our strategic partnership with Sarvam.”Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder, Sarvam, “The Odisha Sovereign AI Park will connect high-performance compute with Indian models and real-world applications. Together with HCLTech, we are excited to bring Sarvam’s full-stack AI capabilities to enterprises and public systems at scale.”For HCLTech, India is among the fastest growing technology markets globally and a growth market. It believes that India’s data center ecosystem is on a rapid growth trajectory, driven by strong demand from a vibrant digital economy, data localisation and critical infrastructure needs to support GPU deployments for AI training and inference workloads.“We strive to be an enabler of India's sovereign AI ecosystem with differentiated offerings across the value chain through focused investments and partnerships,” said Roshni Nadar Malhotra, chairperson, HCLTech.Data centres and artificial intelligence (AI) stack are emerging as new revenue opportunities for India’s $315 billion software services industry, which has been struggling to expand business in the face of the AI disruption over the past multiple quarters.Around 10 days ago, HCLTech disclosed its plan to invest Rs 3,500 crore to establish AI data centers, with the potential to scale to 50 MW capacity. The investment is to be made through the company’s new subsidiary and step-down subsidiaries that will be set up for this business.This came alongside muted June quarter earnings for HCLTech, which posted over 20% year-on-year rise in its consolidated net profit at Rs 4,624 crore on a revenue of Rs 34,579 crore, which grew by 14%. Sequentially, the Q1FY27 revenues grew modestly by 1.75% due to revenue decline impacted from the company’s shared productivity benefits with its clients.In dollar terms, the company’s revenue declined 0.5% to $3.65 billion from the previous quarter, and up 2.6% year-on-year in constant currency terms.Meanwhile, HCLTech retained the revenue growth guidance at 1-4% for the full year FY27.HCLTech’s first quarter numbers resembled the industry performance with other top peers including TCS, Infosys and Wipro reported subdued business growth.