Intel bets big on India for data-centre business

Chip maker Intel Corporation is betting big on India as a high-growth market for its data-centre business, fuelled by demand from verticals including high-performance computing (HPC), public sector, financial services and the start-up ecosystem.

The company’s India data-centre business, which contributed $145 million (1 per cent) to Intel’s total Data Centre Group revenues of $14.5 billion in fiscal 2014, is expected to clock double-digit growth this fiscal.

“Asia is a buzzing market for our data-centre business, and India is a high growth-opportunity market for Intel, especially with the digital infrastructure build-out, which the government is driving, gaining momentum. Two years ago, Intel’s data-centre business globally registered 18 per cent growth, and last year, we saw 11 per cent growth in revenue. We expect to maintain double-digit growth rates in our data-centre business,” Prakash Mallya, Director - Asia, Data Centre Group, Intel, told BusinessLine . He said Asia is one of the fastest-growing data-centre markets not just for Intel, but for all companies that are in the business.

As per an estimate of research firm Research and Markets, the global data-centre construction market is expected to grow from $14.59 billion in 2014 to $22.73 billion by 2019, at a CAGR of 9.3 per cent.

At a time when the PC market is shrinking globally, the $60-billion chip maker is counting on data centre, its fastest growing and most profitable business, to drive its future growth.

In the third quarter of the current fiscal reported last month, Intel reported a revenue of $15.8 billion, of which the Data Centre Group contributed $4.5 billion, recording 13 per cent sequential growth and 10 per cent YoY growth.

While Mallya declined to mention the latest India revenues and growth rates of the Data Centre Group for the current fiscal, stating that it is company policy not to split region-wise revenue and growth numbers, he said Intel will be investing significantly in all the Digital India-related solutions, such as IndiaStack, UID and eGovernance 2.0, all of which represent huge workloads that the data-centre business will address.

In an interaction with BusinessLine early last December, Diane M Bryant, Senior Vice-President and General Manager, Data Centre Group for Intel, had revealed that India revenues of $145 million in the data-centre business in 2014 would witness a 50 per cent growth in fiscal 2015, which would translate to approximately $218 million. According to Bryant, the Data Centre Group was expected to grow at 15 per cent CAGR globally, over the next five years.

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