Why Cloud Telephony Is Driving Data Centre Growth in Ahmedabad and Mangalore

For years, India's data centre industry has followed a familiar blueprint. Facilities were built where power was abundant, fibre connectivity was robust, and latency to major business hubs could be minimised. That logic turned Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad into the country's dominant digital infrastructure hubs.

But AI-powered cloud telephony is adding an unexpected variable to that equation.

A source from a Bengaluru-based data centre company tells AIM that it chose to establish facilities in Ahmedabad and Mangalore not only because of connectivity or latency considerations, but also because several cloud telephony customers were expanding aggressively into those markets.

According to the executive, those customers preferred telecom circles that let them offer business numbers with local area codes. Such numbers are seen as more familiar and trustworthy than generic business or landline numbers, making calls more likely to be answered than ignored or mistaken for spam.

While telecom numbering is regulated separately from data centre operations, the source suggests customer expansion strategies, rather than infrastructure economics alone, are starting to influence where additional capacity is needed.

The claim reflects one company's experience rather than an industry-wide practice, but it highlights how enterprise applications are increasingly shaping India's next generation of digital infrastructure.

Voice Platforms Are Becoming AI Platforms

The timing matters. Cloud telephony is no longer just IVRs and business phone numbers; modern platforms now include conversational AI, real-time transcription, sentiment analysis, automated quality monitoring and AI voice agents, all of which need far more computing power.

In an earlier conversation with AIM, CallerDesk Co-Founder Kaushal Bansal said the company was founded after spotting a gap in India's voice communications market. "We found that there is a huge gap for this voice communication," he had said. 

There was no company that SMEs could readily use. Businesses either had to buy a basic IVR or invest in a full call centre solution costing around ₹50 lakh. The company wanted businesses to be able to simply download an app, configure their IVR and onboard cloud call centre services at almost 90% lower cost.

CallerDesk is also developing AI tools that can predict likely customer conversations and coach agents in real time, illustrating how cloud telephony is evolving into an AI-native communications platform.

Why India's Infrastructure Map Is Changing

The decentralisation of enterprise AI infrastructure is already underway, according to Nutanix.

"What I find most striking in my conversations with enterprise leaders across India is that the geography of ambition has fundamentally shifted," Faiz Shakir, Vice President and Managing Director, India & ASEAN, Nutanix, tells AIM.

"The question is no longer whether to expand beyond Mumbai and Bengaluru—it is how fast to do so."

This shift in perspective marks a departure from traditional models of centralisation, as businesses prioritise agility and local relevance over older metrics of infrastructure development.

Shakir says Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Coimbatore and Indore are emerging as important locations because enterprises increasingly want computing resources closer to where data is generated. He points to Nutanix's latest Enterprise Cloud Index, which finds that 81% of Indian enterprises believe their current infrastructure is not fully prepared for AI workloads.

Cloud telephony is among the workloads driving that shift.

"For latency-sensitive applications like cloud telephony, customer experience platforms, and real-time AI inference, proximity to the end user is non-negotiable," Shakir says.

Instead of viewing latency, governance and cost as competing priorities, enterprises are adopting distributed hybrid multicloud architectures that allow workloads to run wherever they deliver the greatest business value.

The Customer Is Influencing Infrastructure

The Bengaluru data centre executive believes cloud telephony customers represent a subtle but increasingly important example of that trend.

Unlike hyperscale cloud providers, cloud telephony companies are driven by customer acquisition and regional business expansion. As they enter new markets, they increasingly seek telecom circles that help businesses establish a stronger local presence.

Industry experts have also noted that businesses often prefer local virtual numbers because familiar area codes improve customer recognition and trust, leading to better answer rates than unfamiliar or generic business numbers.

That, in turn, creates fresh demand for infrastructure in regions that previously sat outside India's primary data centre corridors.

The executive says Ahmedabad and Mangalore emerged as attractive locations because they aligned with customers' regional expansion plans and offered the connectivity and infrastructure needed to support those workloads.

Although latency, fibre availability and power remain fundamental considerations, enterprise demand is becoming far more application-specific than before.

Infrastructure Is Following Applications

Shakir believes India’s digital infrastructure landscape is undergoing a shift toward greater distribution and sector-specific focus, aligning itself more closely with centers of economic and industrial activity.

He points to states such as Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh as key strategic regions rising in importance, complementing established hubs like Maharashtra and Karnataka, driven by robust industrial expansion, ongoing digital infrastructure investments, and favourable policy frameworks.

As AI turns voice communication into a compute-intensive workload, infrastructure providers are increasingly following where enterprise applications grow, where businesses build regional customer bases and where digital interactions begin.

That suggests India's data centre expansion may be shaped as much by customer demand as by computing power in the AI era, infrastructure increasingly follows applications, not just geography.