Picks and shovels for Modi's AI dream
A Blackstone-led consortium is putting up to $600 million in equity into Neysa, an Indian startup founded in 2023 that builds and operates GPU-based AI infrastructure for enterprises.
On top of that, Neysa plans to secure another $600 million in debt financing, bringing the total to $1.2 billion for a company that isn't even three years
old.
🤝 Blackstone's Amit Dixit, head of Asia private equity, will partner with Neysa co-founder and CEO Sharad Sanghi to scale the business.
The details
Neysa deploys GPU clusters inside India - for banks, tech firms, hospitals and government agencies. The fresh capital will fund the rollout of more than 20,000 GPUs across the country, specifically for AI training and high-performance computing.
Joining Blackstone in the round are Teachers' Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE and Nexus.
The key thing here: Neysa designs and operates its systems entirely within India. Data stays onshore. Modi's government is pushing hard on "sovereign compute" under the IndiaAI Mission banner.
The bigger picture
For Blackstone, Neysa fills the India gap in a global AI infrastructure portfolio that already includes QTS and CoreWeave in the US, AirTrunk across APAC and Firmus in Australia.
The timing could hardly have been better. On the same day, Adani announced $100 billion for AI data centers by 2035. Modi had flown in Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google's Sundar Pichai and half a dozen other tech chiefs for the India AI Summit in New Delhi. AMD simultaneously signed an expanded AI partnership with Tata.
India is clearly serious about this. Whether the country can actually build compute capacity as fast as the cheques are flying is the real question.
👉 Full story: Bloomberg, DealStreet Asia, CRN Asia
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