A new employment engine could be emerging for India’s engineering graduates as the country accelerates the build-out of the digital backbone powering its online economy, offering a potential counterweight to slowing hiring in information technology (IT) services.
Data localization, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and tax holidays are combining to double the projected size of India’s data centre industry over the next six years. This is expected to generate over 100,000 jobs for engineering graduates in the coming years.
Since January 2025, homegrown conglomerates such as Reliance Industries Ltd, Adani Enterprises and Tata Sons, independent data centre firms such as Airtel’s Nxtra, Equinix and Hiranandani’s Yotta, and American Big Tech firms such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon have cumulatively announced cumulative investments upward of $250 billion in India’s data centre economy.
On 8 November, brokerage firm Jefferies predicted India’s net operational data centre capacity to rise to 8 gigawatt (GW) by 2030, up from its current estimate of 1.5GW. Top industry executives believe this can double to 16GW by 2032, driven by tax-free cloud services operations that the government pitched to foreign cloud operators in its 2026 Union budget.
On 1 February, in her budget speech, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced a tax holiday until 2047 for foreign cloud providers to use Indian data centres for their operations.
“There are various types of direct engineering employment that data centres generate. For every 30-50 megawatt (MW) of capacity, data centres need about 50 core engineers for network and management operations, as well as another 100 core engineers for software operations, product engineering and associated areas. An equivalent number will work in additional partner industries that will come up as this industry matures,” said Seema Ambastha, chief executive of Vyoma, the data centre division of India’s largest engineering firm, Larsen & Toubro Ltd.
Ambastha said the prospect of India’s data centre capacity being doubled is compounding this addition. “India currently generates 20% of the world’s data, and houses 3% of it. If we can double this by accelerating data centres, the net capacity projected for the next half a decade will also rise from around 8GW expected today, to nearly 16GW by 2032. This will also increase the number of engineering jobs generated by this industry in a linear way, even if not exponentially,” she said.
Ambastha’s projection adds up to about 110,000 core engineers that India’s data centres will likely employ over the next six years.
Other top industry executives also concurred. Manoj Paul, managing director of data centre firm Equinix India, said that “for every 100MW, additional products such as cloud services, data compliance and management, and other various services will lead to the addition of about 1,000 core engineers to the industry.”
Sunil Gupta, chief executive of Yotta Data Services, said the company is looking to hire “about 1,000-1,200 engineers” over the next one year, as it increases its net operational capacity. “We already have about 2,500 engineers working on our cloud-based value-added services offerings. In the next one year, we’ll hire more, and look further depending on how we expand,” he said.
Offsetting IT services drag
The job generation potential from data centres comes at a time when India’s tech services industry, expected to generate $315 billion in net revenue this fiscal, has been slowing down.
Data from industry body Nasscom shows India’s tech industry’s net employment has grown a meagre 2% in FY26, having added about 130,000 engineering jobs to the country over the past four quarters.
Yet, engineers continue to graduate in large numbers. Data from November last year by employment services firm TeamLease said India sees 1.5 million engineering graduates each year, but continues to face significant employment mismatch due to a lack of suitable jobs, as well as missing skillsets.
Industry stakeholders claim that only about 20% of all engineers, or about 300,000 of them, graduating in India have core IT skills to get employment each year. With recruitment in IT firms slowing, the rise of data-driven engineering jobs across data centres could plug some of this gap.
Analysts largely concur with this assessment.
“India’s data centres are significantly adding value-added cloud services, which is the core area for them to generate additional revenue. As demand for such independent cloud operations increase from small businesses and startups alike, more data centre operators are likely to set-up tech services and create more jobs,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder and chief analyst of tech consultancy firm, Greyhound Research.
And unlike traditional IT services hiring cycles, data centres would typically require a steady workforce of engineers for operations, networking and cloud infrastructure, boding well for employment if the data centres do come up as planned.
The rise of engineering jobs will come even for diploma holders, some believe.
One such is Bimal Khandelwal, chief executive of Singapore Technologies Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT-GDC), who told Mint that the firm generates significant engineering jobs for networking and maintenance roles across its increasing footprint of data centres across India.
“The jobs generation will not be in the thousands, but with increasing capacities, we expect to employ hundreds of engineers in core areas, which can also help skill these engineers for larger roles,” Khandelwal added.