Airtel Cloud customer count touches about 40; manufacturing firms account for quarter: Sources

Bharti Airtel's homegrown cloud platform has signed up around 40 customers within a year, with manufacturing companies accounting for about a quarter of its clientele, as the telecom major looks to tap growing demand for sovereign cloud infrastructure from Indian enterprises, according to sources.

The latest tally reflects a steady expansion of the cloud business since its launch in August 2025, when Airtel's digital subsidiary Xtelify rolled out Airtel Cloud, a sovereign, telco-grade cloud platform designed for Indian companies.

The cloud customers count has touched about 40 in all, and nearly 25 per cent of these are manufacturing customers, sources said.


Manufacturers like VE Commercial Vehicles are among the companies using Airtel Cloud, sources aware of the developments said.

An email sent to Airtel for comments did not elicit a response.

Airtel Cloud, originally built for Airtel's large-scale digital operations, has been battle-tested to handle 1.4 billion transactions per minute. The sovereign, India-hosted platform offers cloud infrastructure, connectivity and GenAI-based provisioning, enabling enterprises to scale mission-critical and regulated workloads while maintaining data control and avoiding vendor lock-in, as per the company.

Airtel Executive Vice Chairman Gopal Vittal had said during the company's Q1 FY27 earnings call that Airtel Cloud had added 11 new customers during the quarter, taking its customer count to 33 at the time.

"We continue to see a strong momentum here with almost all critical services now live on our platform," he had said of the 'built in India, built for India' offering.

As such, manufacturing is emerging as an important market for cloud services as factories increasingly deploy connected machines, automated production lines, industrial sensors and AI-driven analytics, generating larger volumes of operational and production data.

For manufacturers, cloud infrastructure is moving beyond traditional IT modernisation to become an enabler for integrating legacy systems, production applications, warehouses and supply-chain platforms, while providing the computing and storage capacity required for automation, analytics and artificial intelligence.

The increasing digitisation of factories is also putting a sharper focus on where industrial data is stored and who controls it, particularly given the sensitivity of intellectual property, proprietary manufacturing processes and operational information.

This is creating a potential market for sovereign cloud platforms, where data and critical cloud infrastructure remain under domestic control, as manufacturers seek to scale AI and other digital applications while meeting security, governance and compliance requirements.

Business continuity is another key consideration for manufacturers, since technology outages can disrupt production schedules, inventory movement, supplier coordination and customer commitments.

Airtel Cloud offers automated backup, data replication, and disaster recovery capabilities; its integrated connectivity enables secure links between factories, offices, cloud environments and disaster-recovery sites through Airtel's network.

Vittal has said the company is seeing traction for relatively straightforward cloud propositions that enterprises can buy and deploy, including disaster recovery, backup-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service and video surveillance-as-a-service.

"...where we are seeing traction is around simple propositions which can be easily bought, for example, disaster recovery, backup as a service, storage as a service, video surveillance as a service. These are where we have won a lot of the deals...over the last quarter," he had said during the Q1 earnings call.

Larger deals, however, are emerging around sovereign cloud requirements involving more sensitive workloads, particularly in regulated sectors and public-sector enterprises, according to Vittal.

"The one place where the deals are large is the need for sovereign clouds where there are more sensitive workloads. This is largely in the regulated spheres or in the PSU spheres. And these are the areas where a lot of the certification work that is going on is underway," Vittal had said.