Data centre bosses cash in on India's AI and cloud expansion with handsome pay packages

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Mumbai/Bengaluru: It’s boom time for data centres in India and their chief executive officers. Financials reported by India’s top data centres reviewed by Mint show that as they raked in higher revenue, their chiefs were handsomely rewarded.

Manoj Paul, managing director of the Indian operations of Redwood City, California-based data-centre company Equinix, emerged as the top earner, taking home ₹ 5.91 crore in annual pay, although this was down 13% from FY24.

While Equinix did not disclose if Paul’s salary was tweaked because of equity-linked payouts, it coincided with the company reporting its slowest annual revenue growth since Paul took charge in September 2021.

Ashish Arora, CEO of Nxtra by Airtel, saw his remuneration rise largely in line with the company’s annual growth in earnings. Since joining in August 2022, Arora’s salary has increased at a compounded annualized growth rate of nearly 10% over four years to ₹ 3.1 crore in August 2026. Nxtra’s revenue grew at a CAGR of 15% to ₹ 2,434 crore over this period.

Piyush Somani, chairman and managing director of ESDS Software Solution, saw his net pay more than double from ₹ 83.8 lakh in FY24 to ₹ 1.8 crore in FY26, comfortably outstripping his firm’s 65% revenue growth to ₹ 472.2 crore over the same period.

As India’s $5.5 billion data centre industry enters its biggest expansion phase yet, driven by demand from cloud companies and artificial intelligence (AI) businesses, executives leading the charge are winning a premium to manage these large projects, negotiate with global technology companies and deliver on time.

Indian business houses, standalone operators and Big Tech companies have committed cumulative investments over $250 billion over the past 12 months to build data centres and AI infrastructure.

Stock options

Some executives are also being rewarded with equities. Nxtra’s Arora was granted 6,186 stock options in FY25, according to the company’s FY25 annual report. The filing did not establish their eventual cash value.

ESDS’s Somani, who is also the founder of the Nashik-based data centre company, holds about a fifth of its shares. The company commanded a market capitalization of over ₹ 13,000 crore on Friday. ESDS is eyeing $5 billion revenue in five years, Mint reported on 21 October.

“Remuneration is linked to how a data centre company performs,” said Amit Chandra, vice president at HDFC Securities. “In a high-growth industry such as data centres, growth must not be an issue. Seems like bosses are paid based on execution and ensuring capacity goes live on time even as demand skyrockets. The faster the capacity that can go live, the better the pay, it seems.”

Four companies – Yotta Data Services, NTT India, STT Global Data Centres and CtrlS Datacenters – did not disclose individual salaries or equity grants awarded to their top executives.

For three other data centre companies – AdaniConneX, TCS HyperVault and Sify Infinit Spaces – Mint could not ascertain how the salaries of their top executives increased. The latest available pay packages, however, all exceed ₹ 1 crore – AdaniConneX’s Samir Vora earned ₹ 1 crore in FY26 and HyperVault’s Deepesh Nanda earned ₹ 1.6 crore in FY26. Sify’s Sharad Agarwal earned ₹ 1.8 crore in FY25. Sify has not disclosed the salaries in its FY26 annual report.

For now, the data centres are in the building and expansion phases.

Ctrl S Data Centres and Sify Infinit Spaces declined to comment. Mint ’s emails to the other eight companies seeking details of their pay packages and related expansion plans, did not receive responses until publishing time.

IT executives

While the incomes of data centre chiefs jumped, their salaries remain significantly lower than those of the top executives of India’s IT services industry. Mint research showed that the salaries of the 10 largest tech outsourcers’ bosses ranged from ₹ 27 crore to ₹ 390 crore as of FY26, with a majority of the pay from stock options.

“IT services firms are way bigger than data centres and the responsibility of managing them is much higher than data centres, which explains fatter paychecks to IT firms’ heads,” said Kunal Bajaj, an equity research analyst at Choice Institutional Equities.

Bajaj, however, added that the gap is expected “to narrow, as most of these data centre operators are growing at double-digits, so the quantum of their heads’ salaries will also increase.”

About the Author

Jas Bardia is a Bengaluru-based business journalist covering India’s information technology (IT) services sector and Global Capability Centres (GCCs). Known for his investigative depth and attention to detail, Jas has a knack for breaking stories on leadership shifts, high-stakes deals, and evolving industry trends long before they hit the mainstream. If the news is anything IT-related, chances are this author has broken it. Before joining Mint in November 2023, Jas honed his financial reporting skills at Bloomberg News in Mumbai, where he covered bonds and currencies following his graduation from the Asian College of Journalism. When he isn’t chasing his next exclusive, Jas is likely scouting the city’s newest culinary spots, cool events, or is immersed in the electric atmosphere of a Bengaluru FC match at the Sree Kanteerava Stadium. Jas has an eye for detail, an ear for history, and a weakness for a great cologne, and values a good conversation as much as a good lead. If you want to talk about your favourite war movie, funny drunk stories, or a supposed “scam”/wrongdoing in a company, get in touch with him at jas.bardia@livemint.com.

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