India is in the middle of a data centre investment boom. Global technology companies and infrastructure operators are committing billions of dollars to build hyperscale and AI-ready facilities.
On September 2, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal described India as the “world’s best location for setting up data centres” and said the sector could attract around $200 billion in potential investment.
The government is now working to remove bottlenecks around power, land, regulatory approvals and fiscal policy, while states compete aggressively for data centre investments through land, subsidies, tax incentives and policy support. But behind the race to attract billions of dollars lies a less obvious question: how many permanent jobs will these data centres actually create?
The distinction matters because employment figures attached to data centre projects can include direct jobs, construction work and indirect employment. These categories can represent very different types of jobs and have very different lifespans.
Google’s much larger $15-billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam presents another example. The project includes a gigawatt-scale data centre and supporting digital infrastructure. According to the Union government, the investment is expected to create 5,000–6,000 direct jobs and 20,000–30,000 total jobs in Andhra Pradesh.
These numbers are significant. But they should not be read as the number of people who will eventually work inside the data centre.
Construction can require a large workforce for civil engineering, electrical installation, cabling, equipment deployment and commissioning. Once a facility becomes operational, the workforce requirement changes.
The industry is capital intensive and increasingly automated. That means a massive facility can operate with a relatively lean workforce compared with a conventional technology campus.
The Specialised Talent Problem
This creates an interesting contradiction.
Data centres may not generate software-industry levels of employment. Yet operators are still struggling to find people with the specialised skills needed to run increasingly complex facilities.
Prachitha Kuchkulla, President-Human Resources at CtrlS Datacenters, tells AIM that the challenge is not a shortage of engineers.
“India has a very strong engineering talent base. The challenge for the data centre industry is not the availability of engineers, but finding enough professionals with specialised data centre skills and experience at the scale and pace at which the industry is growing.”
The skills required are also becoming more multidisciplinary as data centres are designed for AI workloads.
Operators need people who understand areas such as power systems, cooling, automation, networking, cybersecurity and data centre operations. AI infrastructure also brings new requirements around high-density compute, GPUs and thermal management.
This makes it difficult for companies to simply hire from the existing data centre talent pool.
Kuchkulla says the industry needs to expand that pool through new-talent development, upskilling and hiring from adjacent industries.
CtrlS Datacenters is investing in continuous learning and hands-on capability building across areas including hyperscale construction, AI-ready infrastructure, advanced cooling, renewable energy systems, commissioning and operations.
The company is also working with academia to create an entry-level talent pipeline.
“Going forward, we believe we need much deeper industry-academia collaboration to create specialised data centre curricula and practical training for emerging AI infrastructure technologies,” Kuchkulla says.
India already has a large engineering workforce. The challenge is adding specialised data centre skills to that base quickly enough.
The Automation Question
There is also a broader structural issue.
Vikas Lohchab, a policy analyst, argues that the relationship between data centre investment and employment is often misunderstood.
“Despite successive government policies, heavy investment from tech giants, and subsidies and tax holidays promising jobs, ground-level corporate hiring remains low and looks set to stay that way,” he says.
According to Lohchab, data centres are fundamentally different from labour-intensive technology operations.
“Once construction ends, gigawatt-scale sites need only a handful of staff, exposing the gulf between political job claims and actual long-term recruitment,” he says.
The point is not that data centres require no workers. They do. Facilities need teams for engineering, operations, security, maintenance, network infrastructure and labor-intensive work.
But automation allows many functions to be monitored and managed with fewer people than would be required in a conventional technology campus.
Modern facilities use automated monitoring, predictive maintenance, remote infrastructure management and software-based controls across power, cooling and other systems.
Some technology and engineering functions can also be handled from regional or global operations centres rather than being located at the data centre itself.
This creates a gap between the size of the investment and the size of the workforce physically required to operate the facility.
Construction Jobs are not Permanent Jobs
The distinction becomes particularly important when states announce employment numbers alongside investment proposals.
During construction, data centres can generate significant local employment. Projects require workers across civil, electrical and mechanical systems, cabling, security and equipment deployment.
But many of these jobs are temporary.
Once the facility becomes operational, the workforce typically becomes smaller and more specialised. The jobs that remain are concentrated around operating and maintaining the infrastructure.
This does not make construction employment unimportant. It simply means that a construction job should not be treated as equivalent to a permanent operational position.
The distinction is already visible in some of India’s emerging data centre projects.
Andhra Pradesh, for example, is pursuing several large data centre investments. In August 2026, the state approved land for a hyperscale data centre campus in Visakhapatnam district with an estimated total project investment of ₹1.76 lakh crore. The state has also approved a 1,000 MW hyperscale and colocation facility in Anakapalli district.
The scale of these investments is enormous. But the number of people needed to operate the resulting facilities will be determined by the infrastructure design, degree of automation and services being delivered, rather than by the investment amount alone.
That is why comparing a data centre with an IT-services campus can be misleading.
Jobs May be Outside the Data Centre
This does not mean data centres have a limited economic impact. In fact, their biggest employment contribution may happen outside the facility.
Data centres provide the physical infrastructure on which cloud services, AI applications, fintech platforms, GCCs, startups and other digital businesses operate.
Google’s Visakhapatnam project, for example, is not simply a data centre. Its planned AI hub combines data centre capacity with renewable energy and expanded fibre and subsea connectivity. Google has described the $15-billion investment as a broader AI infrastructure initiative rather than just a server facility.
That changes how the employment question should be framed. Instead of asking only “How many people will this data centre employ?”, policymakers should also ask “What economic activity will this infrastructure enable?”
A new data centre can support companies that employ thousands of people without those employees ever working inside the facility.
For policymakers, this distinction is becoming increasingly important. Employment projections attached to large infrastructure projects should ideally separate construction jobs, permanent direct jobs, indirect employment and jobs enabled by the wider digital ecosystem.
That would provide a clearer picture of what taxpayers and local economies can expect from data centre incentives.
India’s data centre expansion could still have a significant economic impact. But unlikely to recreate the mass-employment model associated with the software and IT-services industry.
The country may build some of the world’s largest digital infrastructure facilities without creating correspondingly large on-site workforces.
The bigger employment opportunity may not be inside the server halls. It may be in the AI, cloud, software, GCC and startup ecosystems that those server halls enable.
Your reaction