HCLTech plans $1.48 billion AI data center in Odisha

HCLTech said it would invest 142.57 billion rupees, or $1.48 billion, to set up its first AI data center in Odisha with homegrown startup Sarvam AI and the state government. The project also included a 5,000-seat tech hub, putting a large physical footprint behind India’s push to secure more of the infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence.

The deal builds on a deeper relationship between HCLTech and Sarvam AI. On June 15, HCLTech agreed to buy a 10.5% stake in the startup, valuing it at $1.5 billion. HCLTech later said Sarvam had raised $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B at the same $1.5 billion valuation, a sign that the partnership was already moving beyond a single project and into a broader strategic tie-up.

Odisha had already cleared the plan, and the state has been trying to pull in more large industrial bets. On July 21, Odisha approved corporate investments worth $475 million, and Business Standard said on July 22 that the government had approved HCLTech’s project. Separate coverage described the buildout as an AI-optimised data centre and Global Development Centre in Bhubaneswar, placed one part of the plan at 730 crore and projected 6,000 high-skilled jobs.

The scale matters because data centers sit at the center of the AI arms race. They house the power, cooling, networking and chips needed to train and run models, and countries that can host more of that capacity have more control over who gets to build, deploy and profit from AI systems. For India, the Odisha project is another step toward local compute capacity and sovereign AI, rather than a model that depends entirely on foreign cloud providers and offshore hardware.

It also points to a broader shift in the Indian technology sector. HCLTech has long been known as a software and services company, but the Odisha plan pushes it closer to the harder, more capital-intensive layer of AI infrastructure. If the project is delivered at scale, it could help HCLTech move up the stack while giving Sarvam AI access to capacity that smaller firms often struggle to secure.