Data centres will help create jobs: Nvidia CEO

NEW DELHI: Days after the moves announced in the Budget, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that data centres will help replicate success of the internet to create jobs in the country.

“We have a giant investment in India and we have a lot of partnerships in India. I prefer that India not only welcome data centre companies to India, but also build data centres in India by Indian companies. The actual building of the data centre is maybe 5,000 people, 10,000 people, and there are electricians and plumbers and construction… the upstream as well as the downstream implication of having and then enabling technology infrastructure is incredible. Look at the internet in India. The amount of jobs that it has created upstream as well as downstream. Incredible. Artificial intelligence will do exactly the same thing,” he said.




In the Budget, FM Nirmala Sitharaman had proposed to provide a tax holiday till 2047 to any foreign company providing cloud services to customers globally by using data centre services from India. It will, however, need to provide services to Indian customers through an Indian reseller entity.

Officials said profits on the income from domestic economic activities will remain taxable as any other domestic company. This will include income data centre services to the global entity by the resident data centre and resale of cloud services to Indian customers by the resident reseller entity.

But, in cases where the Indian data centre is a related entity of foreign company (cost plus centre), a safe harbour margin of 15% has been provided to ensure certainty to businesses.

“The whole arrangement has been made in a fashion that Indian data centres can offer their services to global entities to make use of them without the global entities having any risk of being entangled with our taxation. That certainty enables them to look at our data centres purely from a commercial financial technology perspective. It is the pure market competitive factor that should determine the decision. Tax should not become a deterrent in that process,” revenue secretary Arvind Shrivastava said at a post-budget conference.