On 24 July 2026 HCLTech announced a ₹14,257 crore investment to build an AI data centre at the Odisha Sovereign AI Park in partnership with Indian startup Sarvam and the Government of Odisha; an MoU was signed the same day.
Project snapshot
- Investment: ₹14,257 crore (approx USD 1.48 billion).
- Partners: HCLTech, Sarvam (Indian AI startup), Government of Odisha.
- Location: Odisha Sovereign AI Park (state-level AI infrastructure facility).
- Agreement date: MoU signed 24 July 2026.
- Employment: Project estimate ~5,000 jobs.
- Target services: Sector-specific and multilingual AI applications for public and private use.
AI data centre — technical features
- Primary functions: Model training, inference, long-term storage and model serving.
- Compute: GPU/accelerator clusters and high-performance compute nodes for parallelised training.
- Infrastructure needs: Large-scale power, industrial cooling, redundant networking and physical security.
- Efficiency metric: PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) used to assess energy performance of data centres.
Policy and legal linkages
- Sovereign AI: Domestic control of data, models and infrastructure to ensure jurisdictional autonomy in AI deployment.
- MoU: Standard preliminary instrument for public–private agreements on infrastructure in India.
- State facilitation: Odisha providing project-level support and financial assistance for the Park.
IASPOINT Booster Facts
- HCLTech: Indian IT company headquartered in Noida expanding into full‑stack AI and data‑centre services.
- Data‑centre classes: Hyperscale, enterprise, colocation and edge—hyperscale suited for large AI workloads.
- Model stages: Training is compute‑intensive; inference requires low latency and scalable serving infrastructure.