Bhubaneshwar: After Andhra Pradesh’s Vizag grabbed headlines with its data center investments, its Odisha’s turn now. HCLTech, along with AI startup Sarvam AI has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the government of Odisha to set up a $1.48 billion data center in Bhubaneswar. This project will be built in the upcoming Odisha Sovereign AI park and includes financial support from the state government. Along with this, the IT behemoth is also opening a 5,000-seat technology center in the state, expected to open by 2028.
This will be the first data center being set up by HCLTech, with the company having bought a 10% stake in Sarvam AI last month. The MoU for the project was signed in the presence of Odisha CM Mohan Charan Majhi, HCL Chairperson Roshni Malhotra, CEO and MD C Vijayakumar and Sarvam Co-Founder Pratyush Kumar.
According to the plan, the AI data center will leverage HCLTech’s full stack AI capabilities with Sarvam’s foundation models to develop customized AI applications for public and private use, while supporting India’s sovereign AI ambitions and multilingual AI services.
India remains one of the world’s fastest-growing technology and AI markets, with companies looking to enhance their data center ecosystems to catch up with rapidly rising demand from the digital economy, data localisation requirements and the growing need for GPU infrastructure to support AI training and inference workloads.
