Global technology company Lenovo is planning to turn India into a major export base for its infrastructure business. The company aims to design and manufacture artificial intelligence servers in the country for customers around the world, according to a senior executive.
Speaking to a news agency on the sidelines of CES 2026, Scott Tease, Vice President and General Manager of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, said the company will use its Bengaluru development lab to design AI server systems. These systems will then be manufactured at its Pondicherry facility for both domestic use and international exports.
“We are going to be designing a lot of our one- and two-socket systems… think of those as the workhorses of AI in the future. We are going to be designing them in India. Once we have designed and engineered them, we are going to be manufacturing them there as well. It is going to be an important part of Lenovo’s value chain…
“…our initial focus in India is India for India, but given geographic proximity, the quality of the workforce, the fact that we’ve already had such great success building phones and PCs in India, there is no reason at all that the future is going to hold us building servers in India for the rest of the world. Absolutely no reason whatsoever,” Tease said.
Lenovo India is among the companies selected under the Rs 17000 crore IT hardware production linked incentive scheme.
Tease also spoke about the high cost of large data centres, which can be a challenge for micro small and medium enterprises. He suggested a hybrid AI model, where businesses can rely on cloud or GPU service providers to build models.
“Building a model might require something heavy…, but we can outsource that to cloud providers or GPU-as-a-service providers in India who can help build the model,” he said.
He added that once the model is ready, it can run on much lighter hardware such as laptops or edge devices. “It makes it very easy for them to adopt real, powerful AI… It is not power-intensive. It is not expensive,” he noted.
Tease praised the Indian government approach to Sovereign AI and said the country has strong potential due to its large domestic market and skilled workforce.
“You’ve got people that are really interested in building out sovereign capabilities in the country. You’ve got a very AI-friendly, AI-centric government, and that’s going to be a big, big help for that kind of growth in the future,” he said.
On sustainability, he highlighted the need to shift from air cooling to liquid cooling, adding that Lenovo Neptune technology can cut energy use by about 40 percent.
Looking ahead, Tease said talent will be the key factor in the AI era. “It is access to talent, for sure… never before have we seen the possibility for countries or workforces to catch up to more mature workforces, as we see right now with AI the winners are going to be those regions, those companies, those governments that help their people embrace AI as part of what they do,” he said.
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