'Doubling data centre capacity'

NTT Ltd, which merged its data centre and information technology (IT) services divisions last October, is bullish on India, having announced a five-year, $2.5 billion investment in January to build data centres in Maharashtra.

- Shouvik Das & Leslie D'Monte

In a recent interview, Abhijit Dubey, global chief executive NTT, and NTT India CEO, Avinash Joshi, shared the company’s roadmap while explaining why India is NTT’s largest employee base outside its home turf of Japan, and how artificial intelligence (AI) will influence demand for data centres, among other things. Edited excerpts:

What is the extent of operations for NTT in India?

Dubey: We have about 40,000 employees in India, and it’s the largest outside NTT’s home base in Japan. Our India operation has three aspects to it —the first is the internet infrastructure business which offers data centres, marine cables, etc. This is pretty substantial—we’ve made a lot of investments in the past here, and will continue to do so in the future. We have numerous Indian companies as clients here.

Our second business operation is IT services where we provide services to many Indian enterprises. The third is our delivery and innovation hub which we use to deliver services to clients globally, including North America and Europe. These services include consulting, digital transformation, digital operations in apps, infrastructure, business process outsourcing, and more.