Lenovo to expand data centre business in India, plans $1.2 billion investment on AI

Chinese technology major Lenovo is all set to expand its data centre business in India. It is looking to invest over a billion dollars in research and development (R&D) on artificial intelligence and aims to take its adoption to a large group of people in the country.

The company is planning the expansion in collaboration with startups and government partners to host applications of companies in four verticals — manufacturing, financial services, academia and healthcare sectors, reports Economic Times.

The hardware and devices manufacturing has identified 10 countries from a data centre expansion perspective and India is among this list, said Vivek Sharma, MD-Data Centre Group (DCG) at Lenovo India in talks with ET.

The company sees huge business from India. It expects $5-6 billion overall revenue coming from the country in the next three years, said Sharma.

Lenovo is looking to invest $1.2 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) R&D in the country. This investment will also be used to include data centre offerings to its Chennai facility, which manufactures around 5 billion smartphones annually.

Talking about planned collaboration with India-based startups, Scott Tease, executive director-HPC and AI at Lenovo, said the aim behind this move is to “help smaller players leverage AI with its end-to-end solutions”, which is so far at a nascent stage in India and is only being used by super-rich companies.

As per Tease, Lenovo’s move will give an opportunity to the Indian startup community to work under its brand and get help to implement ideas well.

“The startup community in India is rich, active and diverse. But most players working in this space do not have a brand name and 99 percent of their ideas are yet to be fully implemented. They will be able to stand behind Lenovo as a brand name and we can help them take AI adoption to the masses,” said Tease.