L&T shares hit fresh record high on Feb 18 as infra major ties up with NVIDIA; details to know

Engineering major L&T on Wednesday announced a proposed joint venture with NVIDIA to build sovereign, gigawatt-scale AI factory infrastructure, aiming to position India as a global AI powerhouse.

Following the development, shares of L&T rallied as much as 1.28% to hit a life high of ₹4,335 apiece on the NSE.

The partnership targets India's enterprises, policymakers, industry leaders, global offtakers, and analysts seeking production-grade AI capacity amid the country's digital and industrial transformation.

It combines L&T's expertise in engineering, infrastructure development, and execution with NVIDIA's AI infrastructure, including GPUs, CPUs, networking, accelerated storage platforms, the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software stack, and reference architectures for rapid, secure AI adoption.

In a filing to the BSE, L&T said the venture will deploy AI-ready data centre infrastructure, advanced computing platforms, and ecosystem enablement to support large-scale AI workloads across priority sectors.

Aligned with the India AI Mission, it will create sovereign AI infrastructure to build, train and deploy critical data, models and workloads within India, while ensuring interoperability with global ecosystems.

This 'sovereign by-design' fabric will cater to domestic needs, global hyperscalers, cloud providers and enterprises eyeing large-scale AI deployment from India as a strategic hub.

The initiative plans a gigawatt-scale AI data centre factory for high-density, next-generation workloads, enabling efficient and sustainable expansion.

It will scale NVIDIA GPU cluster deployment at L&T's Chennai data centre to 30 MW capacity on a 300-acre gigawatt-scalable campus and at the new 40 MW data centre under execution in Mumbai.

What the L&T Chairman said

"With NVIDIA's platforms and L&T's execution strength, we are building infrastructure that will enable AI to deliver measurable economic impact," L&T Chairman & Managing Director S N Subrahmanyan said.

"Together with L&T... we are laying the foundation for world-class AI infrastructure that will power India's growth and help realise the full vision of India AI," NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang said.

L&T: Recent updates

Early this month, L&T said it plans to commission 18 MW of data centre capacity by March-end, taking its total operational capacity to 32 MW by the end of the current fiscal.

The total capital expenditure for the data centre stands at around ₹1,000 crore.

In the semiconductor business, L&T is focusing on design-led chips and engaging with multiple customers, with most spending being expensed through the profit and loss account, the company said during Q3 earnings conference call.

As far as the electrolyser business is concerned, the company has developed a fully indigenous 4 MW stack and is upgrading it to 8-10 MW, expecting significant orders in the near term.

"As of now, we have almost 32 MW of capacity in the Data Center, out of which 14 megawatts are up and running, and another 18 megawatts will get commissioned by the end of this fiscal year," a company official said during the conference call.

"The total capex investment in the data centre is roughly in the range of ₹1,000-odd crores," the official added.

The official further noted that for semiconductors, "most of the spending that we are doing is still into creating design-led semiconductor chips. We are in touch with multiple customers in this segment. And whatever spending is happening, most of that is getting washed through the P&L itself.

"As far as the electrolyzer business is concerned, we have already made a perfect design of a 100 per cent indigenous 4 MW stack. We are now slowly upgrading it to an 8-10 MW stack. And we do expect a lot of opportunities to come in the near term," the official said.