India's Data Don, Plugged & Playing

In an interview with BW Businessworld's Rohit Chintapali, NTT Data President and CEO ABHIJIT DUBEY discusses how AI efficiency gains are potentially driving greater demand and likely increasing overall power use. He also weighs in on US steel import tariffs and their impact on data centre costs. Excerpts

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With advancements like DeepSeek improving efficiency across AI models, do you see AI's power consumption decreasing and are these new developments having an impact on demand?

I think at a unit level, yes. But at an aggregate level, it'll unlock more demand. So will the overall power consumption be lower, the same, or higher? It's hard to tell. The compute requirement per unit will go down, and so will the power consumption per unit. But the number of units will explode. It'll drive more demand from enterprises, especially for inferencing and fine-tuning. So, total compute and total power usage will likely increase.

Currently, how much of NTT Data's compute is AI-driven and how do you see that scaling in the next one to two years?