NTT DATA has committed $1.5 billion over the next three years to expand its data centre infrastructure in India, with the investment specifically targeted at building artificial intelligence (AI) ready facilities to meet accelerating demand for sovereign AI models amid growing concerns over data control and geopolitical shifts.
As per the chief of CEO office, AI Strategy and Sales Transformation, NTT DATA, demand for sovereign AI in India is being shaped by four converging forces: the need for data residency and regulatory compliance, the requirement to operate at India’s scale, the need for cost-effective solutions, and the necessity to serve India’s linguistic and cultural diversity, which global models do not natively address.
To meet these requirements, NTT DATA is expanding its AI-ready data centre footprint in India, providing local compute capacity, secure data residency, high-performance connectivity and sovereign AI infrastructure. This will enable enterprises and public sector organisations to deploy AI while adhering to local governance and compliance requirements.
She also elaborated on the concept of hybrid sovereignty, which she described as particularly relevant for economies in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. The approach focuses on maintaining strategic control over data, compute and sensitive AI workloads while continuing to leverage the global innovation ecosystem. She clarified that resilience does not mean building every layer domestically, which is unrealistic for most APAC economies, but rather retaining control without isolation.