HCLTech reported a 20.3 per cent year-on-year rise in first-quarter net profit to ₹4,624 crore, while revenue climbed 13.9 per cent to ₹34,579 crore. Both figures beat Bloomberg estimates of ₹4,530 crore in profit on revenue of ₹34,327 crore, with growth led by the financial services, manufacturing, and technology and services segments.
India’s third-largest IT services provider also announced plans to invest ₹3,500 crore to enter the AI data centre business, following the same route as larger rival TCS, with potential to scale the facility up to 50 megawatts of capacity. CEO and managing director C Vijayakumar said the combination of AI-led demand, supply constraints and the push for digital sovereignty gives the company an opening to become a full-stack AI technology solutions provider.
Rather than offering only data centre capacity, HCLTech intends to provide a full stack of services spanning infrastructure, GPUs, models and applications, along with managed services and outcome-based contracts for clients. The investment will be funded through a mix of debt and equity, and Vijayakumar said the company is close to signing its first client with committed capacity, though he did not name a partner.
The data centre push follows HCLTech’s earlier $150 million investment in Sarvam, India’s sovereign language model maker, which will let it offer proprietary models to clients alongside the new infrastructure. Vijayakumar said the greater value lies in small language models trained deeply on the language, data and workflow of a single industry or client, making them faster, more cost-efficient and more accurate than general-purpose systems.
HCLTech’s advanced AI revenue stood at $171 million at the end of the first quarter, up 10.6 per cent sequentially on a constant currency basis. The advanced AI category includes industry AI solutions, AI engineering, agentic AI, physical AI and AI factory offerings, and excludes classical AI, machine learning and robotic process automation.
The company’s headcount fell by 3,292 to 223,889 as of June 30, with attrition at 12.7 per cent and fresher hiring dropping to 1,056 from 1,984 in the same period a year earlier. Chief people officer Ramachandran Sundararajan said fresher hiring would follow last year’s pattern, with a preference for engineers with niche skills who can join the company’s forward-deployed engineer cohort over the next three years.