We have grown faster than industry in our data center business: Airtel Business CEO

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He said the company’s data centre business and connectivity business, both have also grown faster than the market

By S Ronendra Singh

Sharat Sinha, Chief Executive Officer, Airtel Business

Bharti Airtel on Friday said that as enterprises scale applications, the demand for its cloud services are gaining traction and over the last one year of its sovereign cloud infrastructure, it has gotten 33 customers and more are expected in the coming days.

“We launched our sovereign Airtel Cloud last year, and it has had a very good take up. We have more than 33 customers right now and we are right now deploying them, and that continues to rise up because the trajectory of growth is very good in that space. We also expanded our cybersecurity portfolio that has grown very good,” Sharat Sinha, Chief Executive Officer, Airtel Business, told businessline on the sidelines of India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2026 here.

He said the company’s data centre business and connectivity business, both have also grown faster than the market. In the domestic business, there are multiple verticals such as BFSI, government, Manufacturing and also global capability centres (GCCs), and all of them have also grown.

“With AI being more widely used, I expect that trend to continue. There will be more need for data, but more importantly secured connectivity or cloud access. So, we are heavily investing in those areas too — data centres, connectivity, we are investing in Metro — big investment in fibre being done. Many investment have gone in subsea cable capacity also,” Sinha pointed out.

Airtel Cloud provides a sovereign, built in-India cloud infrastructure that gives enterprises greater control over their data, infrastructure and operations, while enabling them to modernise and scale progressively, he said adding that sovereignty goes beyond data residency to include who can access the data, who operates the infrastructure, how the technology is managed and which jurisdiction governs it.

Sinha said by consolidating connectivity, cloud and data centre services on a sovereign Indian stack, Airtel Business is helping enterprises to modernise faster, recover with confidence and retain sovereign control over critical data in India, with potential cost savings while also supporting secure digital growth.

On asked about the rising costs of memory chips and if it was affecting the AI data centre business, and if Airtel was passing on to the customers, he said, “It is a global phenomena. Cost of electronics have been going up and AI (data centre) has driven a lot of supply constraint, but we’re a part of global industry. I think globally it’s adding to cost of all operations, but having said that the way we provide services, it is our cost and globally all are impacted.”

Talking about Airtel’s AI-powered, network-level safety solutions that protect customers from spam calls and SMS, malicious links, banking OTP fraud and call-forwarding scams, he said the company has stopped maximum number of such activities since the launch last year (October 2025), he said.

Called Airtel IQ Gateway, it has flagged over 98.4 billion spam calls and over 4.4 billion spam messages, 1.62 million malicious links blocked, 42.3 million bank OTP alerts and 11 million call-forwarding alerts generated to date. The AI-powered Spam detection analyses 250+ parameters in real time to identify and flag suspected spam calls and SMS, Sinha explained.

“Airtel IQ Gateway extends the same network-grade trust layers to enterprises, unifying SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, business voice and number verification (silent authentication) on a single, DPDP-compliant control plane for safe, scalable customer engagement. The platform solves fragmented, multi-vendor communication stacks by offering unified management, real-time analytics, transparent delivery reporting,” he said.

Asked about how companies like Airtel can participate in developing global framework to curb digital frauds, as the Prime Minister also suggested on the first day of IMC, Sinha said, “We operate in 15 countries, and we have about 370 million plus subscribers in India. Overall between all countries, we have 650 million plus subscribers that makes us second largest telecom company in the world, so we have to do things at global state.”

He said data sovereignty is important, but control planes sovereignty, operational sovereignty is also critical and this is where Airtel differentiate because it has built totally built on its own infrastructure.

“We have multiple regions, multiple availability zones that run from right from Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi...so that kind of availability creates significant resilience. Then, because we also do global business, with global tech companies, we continuously innovate and whatever we create in India, all our subsidiaries outside also use them and leverage with that advantage, But, Indian data should remain in India and we are very clear about that,” he added.