L&T, NVIDIA partner to build gigawatt-scale AI factory

Engineering major Larsen & Toubro (L&T) on Wednesday announced a proposed joint venture with NVIDIA to build sovereign, gigawatt-scale AI factory infrastructure, aiming to position India as a global AI powerhouse.

The partnership targets India's enterprises, policymakers, industry leaders, global offtakers and analysts seeking production-grade AI capacity amid the country's digital and industrial transformation.

It combines L&T's expertise in engineering, infrastructure development and execution with NVIDIA's AI infrastructure, including GPUs, CPUs, networking, accelerated storage platforms, the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software stack and reference architectures for rapid, secure AI adoption.

In a filing to the BSE, L&T said the venture will deploy AI-ready datacentre infrastructure, advanced computing platforms and ecosystem enablement to support large-scale AI workloads across priority sectors.

Aligned with the India AI Mission, it will create sovereign AI infrastructure to build, train and deploy critical data, models and workloads within India, while ensuring interoperability with global ecosystems.

This 'sovereign by-design' fabric will cater to domestic needs, global hyperscalers, cloud providers and enterprises eyeing large-scale AI deployment from India as a strategic hub.

The initiative plans a gigawatt-scale AI data centre factory for high-density, next-generation workloads, enabling efficient and sustainable expansion.

It will scale NVIDIA GPU cluster deployment at L&T's Chennai data centre to 30 MW capacity on a 300-acre gigawatt-scalable campus, and at the new 40 MW data centre under execution in Mumbai.

"With NVIDIA's platforms and L&T's execution strength, we are building infrastructure that will enable AI to deliver measurable economic impact," L&T Chairman & Managing Director S N Subrahmanyan said.

"Together with L&T... we are laying the foundation for world-class AI infrastructure that will power India's growth and help realise the full vision of India AI," NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang said.

In recent years, L&T has expanded into digital infrastructure, including data centres, leveraging India’s rising demand for cloud services and enterprise digitisation. The proposed collaboration with NVIDIA—a global leader in AI chips and accelerated computing—signals a strategic shift from traditional infrastructure to AI-native infrastructure designed for high-performance, large-scale model training and inference.

The concept of “sovereign AI infrastructure” aligns with the government-backed IndiaAI Mission, which emphasises domestic compute capacity, data localisation and trusted AI deployment. As countries worldwide race to secure GPU supply chains and establish national AI compute clusters, gigawatt-scale AI data centres are emerging as critical strategic assets, similar to energy or telecom infrastructure.

AI workloads require significantly higher power density and cooling efficiency compared to traditional cloud computing, making engineering expertise crucial for sustainable expansion.

(With inputs from PTI)