The IT major is teaming up with Bengaluru AI startup Sarvam and the Odisha government to build sovereign AI infrastructure in Bhubaneswar, marking HCLTech’s first move from AI services into owning AI compute itself.
HCLTech has picked its first AI data center location, and it isn’t Mumbai, Chennai, or Hyderabad — it’s Bhubaneswar. The company confirmed plans to build the facility inside the upcoming Odisha Sovereign AI Park, in partnership with foundation-model startup Sarvam and the Government of Odisha, at a planned capital outlay of ₹14,257 crore, roughly $1.4 billion, including financial support from the state government.
The announcement builds directly on HCLTech’s July 13 disclosure of its entry into the full-stack AI market — this is the first concrete infrastructure commitment behind that strategy, and it signals a shift for a company historically known for AI services into a company that also owns the AI compute underneath them.
Inside the Deal
A Memorandum of Understanding formalising the partnership was signed in Bhubaneswar in the presence of Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi and the state’s Minister of Electronics and IT, Dr Mukesh Mahaling, alongside HCLTech Chairperson Roshni Nadar Malhotra, CEO & Managing Director C Vijayakumar, and Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar.
The structure of the partnership splits cleanly along each party’s strength. Sarvam — selected by the Indian government’s IndiaAI Mission from a field of 67 applicants to build the country’s sovereign large language model — brings its foundation models, including the recently open-sourced Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B, trained to support 22 Indian languages with a voice-first design suited to how most Indian users actually prefer to interact with technology. HCLTech brings the infrastructure, enterprise platforms and services layer needed to turn those models into deployable, sector-specific applications for both government and private enterprise.
Why Odisha
Odisha wasn’t an obvious first choice for a company of HCLTech’s scale, and that appears to be the point. “Odisha offers a progressive policy environment backed by excellent infrastructure,” C Vijayakumar, CEO & Managing Director of HCLTech, said of the decision, describing the project as unlocking “the scale of our strategic partnership with Sarvam.”
Roshni Nadar Malhotra, Chairperson of HCLTech, tied the move to the broader national policy backdrop: “In line with the Digital India and Atmanirbhar Bharat vision of Hon’ble Prime Minister Sh. Narendra Modi, we strive to be an enabler of India’s sovereign AI ecosystem with differentiated offerings across the value chain through focused investments and partnerships.”
Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam, framed the park as the connective layer the country’s AI ambitions have been missing: “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.”
India’s Sovereign AI Infrastructure Race
The Odisha investment lands in the middle of a broader scramble to build AI-ready data center capacity on Indian soil. Data localisation rules, rising GPU demand for both training and inference workloads, and a fast-growing digital economy have made sovereign compute a national infrastructure priority rather than a niche enterprise concern — India’s data center sector has seen a wave of large capital commitments over the past year as global and domestic players race to build capacity before demand outpaces supply.
For HCLTech specifically, owning infrastructure changes the nature of its AI business. Selling AI services on top of someone else’s cloud is a margin business; owning the data center that trains and serves those models is a scale business — and a considerably more capital-intensive bet on India’s AI demand curve playing out over the next decade, not the next fiscal year.
There’s More Coming to Bhubaneswar
The AI data center isn’t the only commitment HCLTech has made to the city. The company has separately signed an agreement to build a 5,000-seat Global Technology Center in Bhubaneswar, expected to begin operations by 2028 — turning what might have looked like a single infrastructure announcement into the early shape of a genuine regional hub.
Why It Matters
For Odisha, this is a credibility marker in a race most states are now running — every state government wants to be the site of India’s next major tech infrastructure investment, and few have landed one at this scale from a company the size of HCLTech. For HCLTech, it’s the first hard proof point behind a full-stack AI strategy the company only announced two weeks earlier. And for India’s broader sovereign AI push, it’s a real answer to a real question: whether the country’s AI ambitions get built on foreign infrastructure, or its own.
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Ruchi Kumar is the associate editor at Entrepreneur News Network and TVW News India, where she leads editorial strategy, brand storytelling, and startup ecosystem coverage. With a strong focus on innovation, business, and marketing insights, he curates impactful narratives that spotlight India’s evolving entrepreneurial landscape. She has written extensively on fintech, AI and emerging startups.