HYDERABAD, September 14: Hyderabad now hosts 515 global capability centres employing more than three lakh people, and expects to add another 50 to 70 within the next twelve months, according to Hyderabad: The Rise of a Global Capability Powerhouse, a joint study released by FICCI and property consultancy Anarock. The figures are current to March 2026 and place roughly a fifth of India’s entire GCC base inside one metropolitan region.
The headline number is impressive. The subtext is more consequential: the work being done inside these centres has moved a considerable distance from the back-office processing that built the city’s original reputation.
The numbers behind the claim
The report’s projection of 50-70 new centres is not a forecast built on optimism alone. Hyderabad added over 70 GCCs in FY25, the highest among India’s peer metros, which gives the estimate a track record to stand on rather than a trendline drawn from a single good year.
Employment is where the ambition shows. FICCI and Anarock expect the expansion to generate more than 75,000 high-skilled jobs over the next three to five years — not a one-year figure, and worth reading with that horizon attached. Supporting it will require an additional 8 to 12 million square feet of office space, plus another 2 to 3 million square feet of flexible and managed workspace, the format most multinationals now use to test a city before committing capital to it.
The leasing data tells the story more plainly than any projection. Foreign firms leased 1.9 million sq ft in Hyderabad in 2021. By 2025 that had risen to 4.5 million sq ft. In the first six months of 2026 alone, more than 3 million sq ft was taken up — a pace that, if sustained, puts the year comfortably past the last.
“The sustained leasing momentum reflects the deepening of Hyderabad’s GCC ecosystem and the increasing preference of global enterprises to establish larger and more sophisticated operations in the city,” said Anuj Puri, Chairman of Anarock Group.
That word — deepening — is the one to hold on to.
What has actually changed
For two decades, Hyderabad’s pitch to global employers was straightforward: capable English-speaking graduates, a functioning IT corridor, and costs that undercut Bengaluru. That pitch won the city call centres, shared services and application maintenance work. It did not win it design authority.
The FICCI-Anarock findings suggest that boundary has moved. GCC activity in the city now spans banking and financial services, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, aerospace and defence, automotive, healthcare, and media and sports technology. Within those industries, the functions being located in Hyderabad include AI and machine learning development, product engineering, cybersecurity, financial analytics, chip design and embedded systems.
“Hyderabad’s GCC proposition is broadening well beyond conventional IT-ITeS functions,” said V V Rama Raju, Chairman of FICCI’s Telangana State Council.
The distinction matters commercially. A processing centre is a cost line that can be relocated when a cheaper geography appears. A chip design team or a product engineering group accumulates institutional knowledge, patents and supplier relationships that are expensive to move. The first kind of centre keeps a city employed; the second kind makes it difficult to leave.
Several of these functions also sit naturally alongside industries Hyderabad already dominates. The city’s long-established pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturing base gives life sciences GCCs a local talent pool and a regulatory ecosystem that does not have to be imported. That is a structural advantage, not a policy incentive, and it is not easily replicated by a competing state.
The real estate maths works — for now
Cost remains part of the argument. Prime office rents in Hyderabad run at ₹95-115 per sq ft per month, below Bengaluru and broadly level with Pune. The city holds about 125 million sq ft of Grade A stock, roughly 15 per cent of national inventory, with a further 36 million sq ft in the pipeline.
That pipeline is the underappreciated asset. Occupier decisions in India are increasingly constrained by whether quality space can be delivered on schedule, not by whether it can be afforded. A city with visible forward supply can promise a multinational a move-in date, and a credible date frequently beats a marginally lower rent.
“The GCC boom reinforces Hyderabad’s position as one of India’s most important office markets for the next decade,” said Shirish Godbole, Chief Executive of the Blackstone-backed Knowledge Realty Trust.
Seen against the national picture
India’s GCC sector has crossed 2,100 registered entities operating from more than 3,700 individual centres, employing roughly 2.36 million people and generating close to $98 billion in revenue in FY2026, per industry estimates compiled from nasscom and Zinnov data. GCC demand accounted for close to 40 per cent of all office leasing in the country in 2025.
Bengaluru still leads on absolute count, with over 900 GCC units. Hyderabad’s claim is not that it has overtaken anyone. It is that it is compounding faster from a smaller base, in a market where the competitive constraint has shifted from labour cost to infrastructure delivery and space availability — two areas where the Karnataka capital has struggled publicly.
The competition is also no longer confined to the familiar four or five cities. Karnataka has set out to double its GCC count to 1,000 by 2029. Gujarat has committed a ₹10,000 crore package to attract centres to GIFT City and Ahmedabad. Every major state now has a GCC line item. Hyderabad’s 515 was won in a less crowded field than the next 70 will be.
The policy move to watch
Telangana’s response is to spread the demand rather than concentrate it further. Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy has directed officials to frame a dedicated state GCC policy aimed at pushing investment beyond the saturated Financial District and HITEC City corridor, into what the administration terms “Beyond CURE” — areas along the Nizamabad, Karimnagar and Warangal highway corridors, which are also being positioned for data centre investment.
Running alongside it are the Bharat Future City development, a planned AI City, and Invest Telangana, a proposed single-window agency that would assign escort officers to incoming companies from first visit through commissioning.
Whether decentralisation persuades a global employer to site a team two hours outside Hyderabad is an open question. GCCs cluster for a reason: they hire from each other, and proximity to a deep talent market is worth more to them than a subsidy. The tier-2 push is likely to succeed first for data centres and large-format back-end operations, and only later — if at all — for the high-value engineering work the state most wants.
What would derail this
Three risks are worth flagging against the report’s optimism.
The first is wage inflation. When 515 centres compete for the same AI, chip design and cybersecurity engineers, salaries rise faster than the cost arbitrage that attracted the employers. Hyderabad’s rental advantage over Bengaluru is roughly 15-20 per cent; a sustained talent premium erodes that quickly.
The second is infrastructure. Office supply is being built. Road capacity, metro extension and water provision into the western corridor are moving more slowly, and congestion is the complaint that has done most reputational damage to Bengaluru’s pitch.
The third is concentration. A fifth of the country’s GCCs in one city is a strength in an expansion cycle and an exposure in a contraction. Global capability centres are, ultimately, cost decisions taken in boardrooms elsewhere. A shift in the technology capex cycle, or a change in how offshore R&D is treated in a major economy’s tax code, would be felt in Hyderabad before it is felt anywhere else in India.
None of that contradicts the report. It simply sets a condition on it: the next 70 centres will be won on delivery — of space, of infrastructure, and of engineers — rather than on price.
Figures as reported in the FICCI-Anarock study Hyderabad: The Rise of a Global Capability Powerhouse, current to March 2026. National sector figures are industry estimates and vary by methodology across sources.
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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.