OpenAI Vendor TCS Picks Hyderabad for 1 GW AI Data Centre Campus
HYDERABAD: Tata Consultancy Services’ AI infrastructure arm HyperVault has selected Hyderabad for a massive data-centre campus with capacity of up to 1 gigawatt, with HyperVault and its partners expected to invest as much as ₹70,000 crore as the project is built out in phases.
HyperVault has secured 264 acres for the campus, which is being designed for frontier artificial intelligence companies and hyperscale cloud providers. The facilities will support high-density GPU installations used to train and run advanced AI models and other compute-intensive applications.
The September 5 announcement represents one of the biggest technology-infrastructure commitments secured by Telangana. The company, however, is describing the project as a phased development of up to 1GW, rather than a facility that will have the full capacity available from the outset. Expansion will depend on customer demand and changing technology requirements.
The Economic Times reported that the land is in Hyderabad's Future City region. TCS Chief Executive and Managing Director K. Krithivasan said Hyderabad offered the scale, talent base and technology ecosystem needed to serve global customers.
At full build-out, TCS says the Hyderabad development could rank among India's largest and most advanced AI infrastructure campuses. The design is expected to include high-density computing, liquid cooling, green-energy use and water-neutral principles.
The distinction is important because a one-gigawatt data-centre campus represents an enormous concentration of computing infrastructure. TCS said in November 2025 that India's entire installed data-centre capacity was then about 1.5GW, although the national market is expanding rapidly as AI and cloud companies require significantly more electricity and computing capacity.
Up to 7,000 jobs projected
Telangana Industries and IT Minister D. Sridhar Babu said the HyperVault development could generate as many as 7,000 direct and indirect jobs. Other company-linked reports describe the employment impact more generally as several thousand jobs across construction, engineering, power, cooling, networking and data-centre operations.
The employment impact is therefore likely to extend beyond conventional software jobs. Gigawatt-scale AI campuses require electrical and mechanical engineering, network infrastructure, cooling systems, construction, security and round-the-clock facility operations in addition to specialized computing expertise.
HyperVault Managing Director and CEO Deepesh Kiran Nanda said the company is preparing for increasingly dense AI computing environments requiring liquid cooling, larger power blocks and faster deployment. TCS itself describes HyperVault as infrastructure purpose-built for compute-intensive AI workloads, including direct-to-chip liquid cooling and high rack densities.
Project moved from Davos talks to land selection
The Telangana government says the Hyderabad investment traces its origins to discussions between Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy and Tata Sons Chairman N. Chandrasekaran at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January 2026.
Sridhar Babu said negotiations subsequently moved quickly between the state, TCS and HyperVault. Contemporary reports also say Telangana competed with several other states for the investment, although the claim that Hyderabad beat five rival states comes from the Telangana side and has not been independently documented by the competing governments.
Revanth Reddy called the project a major step in positioning Hyderabad within the global AI infrastructure industry, arguing that local access to large amounts of computing capacity could become a competitive advantage for Telangana.
According to TCS CEO Krithivasan, the centre could become operational 18 to 24 months after construction begins. Revanth Reddy asked the company to target June 2, 2028 for inauguration and said the government would facilitate the necessary approvals.
HyperVault already has OpenAI as its first major customer
The Hyderabad announcement also has an important international dimension.
TCS created HyperVault in 2025 as a dedicated AI data-centre business. It subsequently brought in global investment firm TPG to help finance its gigawatt-scale expansion. TCS and TPG announced an investment commitment of up to ₹18,000 crore in November 2025, including up to ₹8,820 crore from TPG.
In February 2026, HyperVault entered into a major partnership with OpenAI, under which OpenAI will become HyperVault's first customer. The initial agreement calls for 100MW of AI infrastructure in India, with the potential to scale to 1GW over time. OpenAI says the locally hosted infrastructure is intended to provide lower latency and support data-residency, security and compliance requirements.
TCS' annual report similarly says the first 100MW under HyperVault's plan will be built for OpenAI as the anchor customer, with an option to expand to 1GW.
However, neither the September 5 Hyderabad announcement nor OpenAI's earlier statement explicitly says that OpenAI's entire 100MW commitment — or its possible expansion to 1GW — will be located at the Hyderabad campus. The two developments should therefore not be presented as the same project unless TCS or OpenAI provides further confirmation.
HyperVault has also assembled technology and infrastructure relationships involving companies including AMD, Tata Power, Tata Projects, Tata Communications, ABB, Siemens Energy and others as it builds out its AI infrastructure platform.
Why ₹70,000 crore is different from earlier ₹18,000 crore figure
The new investment figure also requires some explanation.
TCS and TPG's November 2025 announcement said the two partners would commit up to ₹18,000 crore to HyperVault over the following years through equity and debt financing. The newly announced Hyderabad project, by comparison, says HyperVault and its partners could invest up to ₹70,000 crore to build and manage the campus.
The latest announcement does not provide a detailed breakdown showing how much of the ₹70,000 crore would be invested directly by HyperVault, how much would come from partners, or how the spending would be distributed across different phases. It should therefore be described as a projected up-to investment at full development, rather than ₹70,000 crore of committed spending immediately underway.
Hyderabad joins India's race for gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure
Hyderabad's win comes amid an extraordinary expansion of AI infrastructure across India.
Google and AdaniConneX have already begun construction of a gigawatt-scale AI hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, as part of Google's approximately $15 billion investment over 2026-2030. Google and Adani have described the Visakhapatnam development as India's largest AI data-centre campus.
Adani separately announced plans in February for a much broader 5GW AI data-centre platform in India by 2035.
Within Telangana, the government is also seeking to develop Bharat Future City as a major cluster for AI, data centres and other advanced industries. Revanth Reddy said in June that the new urban region was being planned to accommodate AI companies, data centres, global capability centres and other technology investments.
For Hyderabad, the HyperVault project could significantly deepen a technology economy historically associated with software development and global corporate offices by adding one of the physical foundations of the AI industry: large-scale computing infrastructure.
That has particular relevance for Telugu professionals in the United States technology sector. Hyderabad would increasingly sit within the same global AI infrastructure ecosystem used by US-based model developers, cloud companies and semiconductor firms rather than serving primarily as an offshore software and services centre. The OpenAI-HyperVault partnership illustrates that broader shift, although the specific allocation of OpenAI workloads to Hyderabad has not yet been disclosed.
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