As an early AI adopter and having a strong digital infrastructure, for India one of the more important factors on which the next leg of AI growth hinges on are data centre capacities. The data centre space has seen not just seen major investment commitments from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft but also fund houses such as Blackstone and TPG Global teaming up with local players focussed on sovereign AI data centres.
For organisations when security, compliance, cost, performance, and AI readiness is largely governing their choice of where workloads reside, cloud repatriation is emerging as a mainstream trend according to Faiz Shakir, Nutanix’s newly elevated vice president-sales for Asias Pacificand Japan (APJ). “Repatriation in India particularly is an absolute reality. Repatriation is significantly higher in India than we’ve seen anywhere else,” he said.
While many enterprises initially moved workloads to public clouds to take advantage of scalability and innovation, he adds that increasingly, enterprises are revisiting those choices. “Customers today are in a transition,” says Shakir. With organisations increasingly being expected to keep critical data and workloads within national borders—for instance, regulatory requirements and data residency laws being demand drivers for sovereign cloud environments that provide greater control over where data is stored and processed. “The minute it’s sovereign, it’s on-premise, it’s within your country, Nutanix sees that as a great opportunity to partner with them,” says Shakir.
Industry-wide partnerships
Pointing at the Enterprise Cloud Index, a Nutanix Survey conducted by Wakefield Research with participants from over 16 countries, 80% considered data sovereignty a high priority when making infrastructure decisions. Global cloud software major Nutanix, in recent years, has also focussed on addressing new challenges as organisations become increasingly concerned about where AI workloads reside and the long-term economics of AI adoption. Its latest acquisition of French company Ryax Technologies and partnerships with NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Hugging Face, and other ecosystem players, are what it sees will help win deals to optimise AI infrastructure for enterprises. “What happens in these partnerships is we all build go-to-market motions together. A motion where we say we’d rather go united in front of the customers and solve needs of customer who needs to integrate it out there,” says Shakir.
The Nasdaq-listed firm, which recently concluded its fiscal year 2026, saw 16% year-on-year growth in its annual recurring revenue from $2.2 billion in 2025 to $2.5 billion in 2026, and 12% revenue growth YoY from $2.5 billion in 2025 to $2.8 billion in 2026. For fiscal 2027, the company has guided revenue to be in the range of $3.18-3.23 billion.
However, Shakir emphasises that enterprises are not abandoning the cloud altogether. “Today you go and speak to CIOs, you speak to CFOs, everyone believes that this is a dynamically moving estate,” he says. Instead, they are moving towards a dynamic hybrid model where workloads can shift between public cloud, sovereign cloud, and on-premises environments based on business needs. While frontier AI models were initially built to operate primarily on hyperscale public cloud platforms, Nutanix believes these providers will also have to adapt in the coming days to enterprise needs. “Frontier models are progressively building partnerships and it’s a matter of time that frontier models realise that they need to work and meet the expectations of so many local data locality laws itself, which is going to force them to have it on-premise as well,” he adds.