TCS shares in focus after CEO says IT major in advanced talks for more AI data centres in India

Shares of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will remain in focus on Friday after the company’s CEO K Krithivasan, said that it is in advanced talks with several tech players to build more data centres for artificial intelligence in India. This comes after the IT major’s recent agreement with OpenAI, signalling adaptation amid concerns of an AI-led disruption in the global tech sector.

“We are having discussions with multiple other hyperscalers…We are in advanced discussion with multiple players,” Krithivasan said during an interview with Bloomberg. He sees an enormous opportunity to deploy AI in India.

According to Krithivasan, India is likely to need around 10 gigawatts of AI data centre capacity by 2030, but only around 5 or 6 gigawatts have been announced so far - a gap that TCS wants to close. “We are very, very bullish. There is going to be a lot of latent demand or unmet demand by 2030, so there is going to be a lot of investment required,” the TCS CEO further said during his interview.

AI-led disruption worries are ‘far-fetched’

Krithivasan dismissed worries that large language models will simply wipe away the need for corporations to operate large tech systems and hire teams of consultants - a worry that led to a massive selloff in global tech stocks earlier this year. “Will the whole value chain be replaced by an LLM? It’s a far-fetched thing. That’s not going to happen. It’s not that you can just go drop Anthropic in there,” he added.

Earlier in February, TCS announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to build AI infrastructure in the country and offer joint market solutions. As part of the agreement announced at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, TCS's HyperVault unit will develop AI-ready, green-energy-powered infrastructure, which will feature purpose-built, liquid-cooled data centres with high rack densities and connectivity.

Also read: 7 out of last 8 mainboard IPOs delivered negative listing gains. What is going wrong with India’s IPO market?

During his latest interview, Krithivasan also dismissed the idea that US President Donald Trump’s rigid immigration rules will hurt TCS. “We hire much more in the US than we send people from India…Our dependence on the H-1B is very limited,” he said.

Shares of the tech giant have declined more than 12% in the past month, after Anthropic’s new AI tools spooked investors about the possibility of massive layoffs and disruption in the IT services sector.

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