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Data centres and artificial intelligence (AI) stack are emerging as new revenue opportunities for India’s $315 billion software services industry, which has been struggling to expand business in the face of the AI disruption over the past three years.As enterprise spending moves from compute and infrastructure towards AI platforms, agents and business applications, IT firms can leverage these early relationships to emerge as end-to-end partners of choice, according to industry experts.In the past few months, leading software service providers have announced acquisitions and partnerships in this segment, signalling an emerging strategic shift.The most recent of these is HCLTech’s Rs 1,427 crore ($150 million) investment for a 10.46% stake in domestic AI firm Sarvam, alongside other private investors.Following the investment, C Vijayakumar, chief executive of HCLTech, the country’s third-largest IT player, said, “We are creating a differentiated full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments, strengthening our ability to deliver secure, scalable and responsible AI solutions.”Along similar lines, India’s largest IT firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is taking an asset-platform route in partnership with global alternative asset management firm TPG to jointly invest up to Rs 18,000 crore ($2 billion) in TCS’ AI data centre business, HyperVault.Global professional services firm Accenture is acquiring 65% stake in data centre design, engineering and consulting capabilities through DLB Associates and in construction consultancy via the Soben acquisition, while Cognizant is adding AI infrastructure operations through the Astreya acquisition for $600 million.“Beyond the immediate revenue opportunity, these investments create strategic option value: as enterprise spending moves from compute and infrastructure towards AI platforms, agents and business applications, IT firms can leverage these early relationships to emerge as end-to-end partners of choice—an area that has traditionally been their forte,” said Somnath Chatterjee, founder and CEO of Prismforce, a software provider to technology companies for workforce transformation.Over the past two-three years, major software service exporters have witnessed a slowdown in growth rate to low single digits against strong double-digit growth for more than two decades previously. With AI disrupting software development, services players are dealing with higher competition from new-age and mid-tier players and tighter corporate client budgets, which are further pulled down by the challenging macroeconomic environment.“Artificial Intelligence compression has been widely debated across the technology services industry. However, the AI also presents expansion opportunities, and this may lie deeper in the infrastructure stack,” said a blog post by US-based technology research firm Everest group co-authored by analysts Yugal Joshi, Zachariah Chirayil and Lalith Kumar.The blog post added that AI adoption is increasing demand for infrastructure-heavy environments that require continuous operational support, resilience and lifecycle management. “As a result, the market opportunity for technology service providers is beginning to extend deeper into infrastructure operations and long-term run services,” it said.Research associated with Cornell University pegged the global data centre market at about $250 billion in 2023, with expectations that it could double by 2030. This growth is expected to be driven by hyperscaler expansion, enterprise AI adoption, graphics processing unit infrastructure demand and modernisation of existing infrastructure environments.With the five largest hyperscalers expected to spend nearly $700-800 billion annually in the next few years, it is too large a value pool for IT services firms to ignore, said Chatterjee.On Thursday, announcing the earnings for Q3FY26, Accenture unveiled its $4.18 billion acquisition plans to expand its cybersecurity business, which has become critical infrastructure for IT service providers.