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SAP Labs opens second campus in Bengaluru with €194 mn investment

SAP Labs opens second campus in Bengaluru with €194 mn investment

SAP Labs has invested about €194 million to start its second campus in Bengaluru, as the research and development (R&D) division of the German software company doubles down on its presence in India at a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the technology landscape.
The second campus, located on the outskirts, complements the existing one in the city's technology hub and has a capacity of 15,000 people, Sindhu Gangadharan, managing director of SAP Labs India, said while inaugurating the new office space.
SAP Labs already has about 14,000 employees in Bengaluru, and the latest addition will raise the headcount to around 29,000. Besides this, the company has offices in Hyderabad, Pune and Mumbai.
SAP Labs India is SAP's largest R&D location outside its headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. It is driving innovation in key AI use cases and solutions across the entire product portfolio — from S/4 HANA to HXM and the latest sustainability suite.
'Every developer will be an AI developer, and they need the talent to understand deep domain expertise,' Gangadharan added.
Thomas Saueressig, board member of SAP SE, said that 75 per cent of SAP engineers have undergone dedicated AI training, while 90 per cent use some AI tools to improve productivity.
SAP Labs told Business Standard earlier this year that it aims to double its customers' productivity gains — from 20 per cent to 40 per cent — through generative AI by the end of this year.
For SAP Labs, 40 per cent of its global R&D workforce is based in India, and 25 per cent of its global patents are filed from here. It also collaborates with professors to help employees write technical papers and contribute to science journals.
Saueressig said SAP is also looking to build its own foundational large language models based on its proprietary data, which will complement models from OpenAI, Mistral and Anthropic.
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