NxtGen Bets Big on Demand for High-Performance Data Centres
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The hills of Ramanagar district, 60 kilometres away from the IT hub of Bengaluru, is most famously known for the shooting spot of Bollywood cult movie Sholay. The hills will still remind you of Gabbar Singh's legendary dialogues in the 1975 blockbuster. But, this story isn't about Sholay. Cut to the modern artificial intelligence (AI)-driven era of technology. And, in the vicinity of these hills, you see NxtGen's massive data centre standing tall on a hillock in the Bidadi Industrial area of Ramnagar.
In 2012, A.S. Rajgopal embarked on the journey of founding NxtGen, where he has been instrumental in steering its remarkable growth over the past decade. The company's flagship high-density data centre facility, sprawling over 10 acres of land in the Bidadi today serves more than 900 customers across the country. NxtGen operates two cloud platforms – SpeedCloud built on Red Hat OpenStack and OpenShift application platforms and three industry vertical clouds for the Government, Financial Services, and Healthcare sectors.
A.S Rajgopal, CEO & MD at NxtGen Cloud Technologies
NxtGen Cloud Technologies was incorporated in August 2012 and commenced operations in 2014. Today, it is on an expansion mode and its overall cloud capacity is growing at 32 per cent annually, supported by a consistent 24 per cent CAGR from existing captive customers over the past 5 years. "Our GPU capacity is expected to double within this financial year, and we aim to sustain that growth trajectory over the next two years," says Rajgopal, CEO & MD at NxtGen Cloud Technologies.
Currently, NxtGen operates five large-scale datacenters that power its sovereign cloud operations. Collectively, these support: over 400,000 virtual CPUs, 1.6 million GB of memory, 200,000 TB of high-performance storage, and 140,000 TB of archival storage.
"Our flagship Bengaluru facility is purpose-built for high-density workloads and houses a large GPU cluster, including NVIDIA H200, AMD, and Intel GPUs. This site is central to enabling India's enterprise-scale AI adoption," says Rajgopal.
Future Growth
The demand for high-performance data centres is being driven by clients' ongoing digital transformation as they modernize legacy systems and deploy cloud-native applications. There is also an uptick in generative AI (GenAI) adoption and demand for sovereign cloud infrastructure.
"In just the last 3 months, we have built over 40 enterprise-specific AI use cases, signaling growing traction. There has been an increase in demand for sovereign cloud infrastructure in government, BFSI, and healthcare sectors, aligned with national priorities for data protection and self-reliance," says Rajgopal.
NxtGen is also focussing on industry-specific value creation. It has a dedicated Government Cloud for hosting population-scale applications such as those for the Election Commission of India. It has a Financial Services Cloud pre-integrated with over 800 regulatory and operational controls, offering compliance-ready infrastructure.
"We are expanding our offerings in healthcare and manufacturing, tailored for sector-specific needs. SMEs are showing strong uptake of our SpeedCloud platform for cost-efficient digital transformation," says Rajgopal.
Asked about his future plans, Rajgopal says, "Our short-term focus is on scaling and hosting enterprise-grade AI use cases that can stand the test of time. We anticipate compute requirements reaching 300 KW per rack, far beyond traditional datacenter capabilities, making infrastructure modernisation imperative. The AI landscape is evolving rapidly, and our goal is to remain agile, providing our customers with the best mix of technology, scalability, and talent access."
NxtGen has secured up to Series B funding rounds with investments from renowned entities such as the International Finance Corporation, Intel Capital Corporation, and Iron Mountain.
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