
NTT CEO on China’s AI shift, India expansion, and future of data centers
inferencing hardware, said Abhijit Dubey, global CEO of the Japanese data centre giant NTT DATA.
“I think it (impact) is far more fundamental. It demonstrated that the unit cost economics are significantly lower from a training and inferencing standpoint. Number two, it demonstrated that open source is viable. And number three, that there's a lot more value in inferencing than just pure training.”
However, despite the Chinese disruption, NTT has not recalibrated capex plans for data centres and the industry is undergoing a boom cycle, he said. Globally, NTT has committed to invest 8 trillion Yen ($59 billion) between FY2023 to FY2027 in data centres and AI.
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As a believer of Jevon’s Paradox, Dubey explained that NTT will be a net beneficiary of more cost-effective AI models like DeepSeek because when “you drop the unit cost economics for an enterprise for inferencing, then they will adopt a lot more and the pie will be bigger.”
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Over the past decade, NTT DATA has invested close to $3 billion to become the largest data centre company in India with 30% market share. Going forward, it plans to invest “roughly half-a-billion every year,” Dubey said.
Organic growth in cloud sans AI as well as fine-tuning and inferencing is tier 1 and tier 2 markets will continue to be NTT’s focus from a data centre perspective.
NTT, on Monday, announced the opening of a 500 MW data centre park in Navi Mumbai, its largest in India. The