India is emerging as a larger contributor to NTT Data’s global AI business as rising AI adoption, growing data generation, and government-backed digital infrastructure drive demand, according to Avinash Joshi, Executive Managing Director – India, NTT Data.
“From a business potential standpoint, India generally contributes 3-4 per cent to the global business. In the case of AI, it may contribute more for two reasons — India is among the top four countries where AI adoption is increasing, and because 20 per cent of the global data today gets created here due to a large population and affordable data. I expect India’s contribution to AI services, for both domestic and global requirements, to be higher than what it has been for the rest of IT services,” he shared.
As a group, NTT is roughly a $93 billion Telco-plus-IT-services company. The company’s IT services business is now about $30 billion of that $93 billion. Over the last 20 years, NTT acquired over 100 different companies outside of Japan, all of which came together under one brand called NTT Data, globally organised like that in 2024.
IT infrastructure is a significant business for the company, spanning partnerships with infrastructure providers such as Cisco, Dell, HP, Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat, and, more recently, Nvidia. It supports around 64 technologies in this space and also provides infrastructure management and operations services. It also has an applications and business process division covering platforms such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and ServiceNow, alongside a range of industry-specific solutions.
“Currently, because of cybersecurity requirements, or the general uptake on the data side, there is a lot of investment in the infrastructure space — compute, storage, network. People are investing in infrastructure for outcomes which won’t come from the infrastructure itself, but from services. We have a reasonable IT services business, which I expect to grow even further, because the outcomes will come from these services,” Joshi noted.
Outside its data centre business, more than 50 per cent of NTT Data’s India business comes from IT services, including infrastructure management and application management services. The company sees this segment as a key growth area, particularly with the increasing adoption of AI. NTT Data has previously said its India business was approaching $1 billion in revenue.
“India’s importance for us is three-dimensional — one is the domestic growth, with the country being among the top 10 markets within our NTT world. The second reason is the availability of talent, and the third reason is the amount of innovation that comes out of India. We have an internal program for filing patents, copyrights, and so on, and more than 50 per cent of the contribution comes from India.”
The company has also decided to establish the headquarters of its security business in India and create an AI delivery hub in the country to serve its global operations.
NTT Data has already invested over $3 billion in India since 2011, and in 2025, announced plans to invest another $1.5 billion annually for the next three years across data centre campuses, strategic acquisitions, submarine cables, renewable energy plants and an innovation centre in Bengaluru to research emerging technologies and applications.
The majority of the $1.5 billion investment, Joshi explained, will go into data centres — a capital-intensive business — and into creating capabilities.
NTT Data has also launched submarine cable landing stations in Mumbai and Chennai, connecting India to its Asia Pacific cable network and onward to global markets. The Mist submarine cable system spans 8,100 km and has been activated by the company.
The company is also investing in its 45,000-strong workforce through hiring, skilling and training, while expanding delivery centres in Mangaluru and Coimbatore, with the latter focused on AI. It also launched an innovation centre in Bengaluru focused on digital twins, AI and quantum operations. India is increasingly serving global operations, with NTT Data creating a chief growth office hub in the country and hiring around 100 people for global sales support.
“Almost everything we offer globally, we offer in India as well; India is a microcosm of what we do globally,” he said.
Published on October 4, 2026
