Oracle expands India cloud footprint on infra biz boom

Oracle is expanding its cloud footprint in India, building on the surge in its infrastructure revenue in the country, as companies move beyond tentative model-testing of AI to the full-fledged adoption of the world's most-invested technology to date.

The US tech giant currently operates two Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions in India, along with multi-cloud deployments inside Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

It is set to launch Oracle services inside Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the coming weeks, taking its total cloud presence in India to five regions, said Chris Chelliah, senior vice president for Technology and Customer Strategy at Oracle Japan and Asia Pacific.


Oracle is betting that AI inference rather than model training will define the next phase of enterprise AI adoption.

“I think 2026 will be the year when projects really scale,” he said. “Initially, the focus was on who would train the next big model. But there will only be a handful of large model companies. The real opportunity is in inference, enterprises adopting AI at scale.”

While hyperscalers race to build massive AI training clusters, Oracle is focusing on enterprise inference by deploying AI models close to where business data resides.

“It’s not just about GPUs and large models. It’s about reaching all your data,” Chelliah said. “Public models are trained on what I call the encyclopaedia of the world, but they haven’t read your policy manuals, approval thresholds, or business rules.”

He explained that the biggest barriers preventing AI pilots from entering production are trust and guardrails. “People ask: can we trust the results?” Chelliah said. “If you ask a question and get the wrong answer, you blame AI — but really, you didn’t ground it with your information.”

Recently, Oracle launched its AI data platform in which system integrators (SI) and consultancies like Accenture, Cognizant, Infosys, LTIMindtree together committed to invest $1.5 billion. Chelliah said that the momentum among SIs is increasing because the platform is not disruptive and allows them to work with legacy tools and applications.

The company’s overall SaaS business in India has grown in double-digit year-on-year. India is also one of Oracle’s largest R&D regions outside of the US with nine product development centers including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Gandhinagar, Noida, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, and Trivandrum. The company employs 50,000 employees here.

Revenue risks? No

On the recent turbulence in software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks, Chelliah reassured that agentic AI does not threaten Oracle’s business model.

“If you’re a SaaS customer, we turn on new AI agents every quarter with the same subscription, more value. If you’re using our data platform, we add autonomous capabilities like patching and security. You just consume outcomes,” he said.

Oracle is challenging the big three hyperscaler dominance with growing push toward multi-cloud strategies to avoid vendor lock-in. Oracle operates over 15 multi-cloud regions across Asia, enabling OCI to run natively inside Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS.

It is also gaining ground as enterprises repatriate workloads from rival clouds due to rising costs and bill shocks.

“Our economics are fundamentally different. We don’t charge egress fees, and our network architecture is significantly cheaper,” Chelliah said.