Gupta entered the data services sector two decades ago. The rest of the world is just about foraying into it. Yotta is now making an audacious bet of spending $1 billion to procure Nvidia's most powerful semiconductor chips. A look into the pioneering entrepreneur and his vision
Sunil Gupta, Co-founder, MD & CEO, Yotta
Image: Mexy Xavier
In the early 2000s, Mukesh Ambani ventured into the telecom business with Reliance Infocomm. Sunil Gupta, then 28, joined among the first few employees as product manager for internet services; he had previously worked with network services company GTL. One day, on the fourth floor of the Maker Chambers IV office in Mumbai’s Nariman Point, Ambani held a meeting, saying the fibre optic cable installation would take a couple of years. Meanwhile, there was another exciting business opportunity to venture into. “That’s when I became acquainted with the data centre business,” recalls Gupta.
Hailing from Ambala in Haryana, Gupta studied BTech in electronics and communications at the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra. After a short stint in Delhi, he moved to the financial capital in the late 1990s.
Following the Ambani brothers’ split in 2005, Infocomm went to Anil, who renamed it Reliance Communications. The data centres continued to be one of the strongest businesses and were unaffected by the change of leadership. “We used to have more than 50 percent of the market share. The business generated much higher Ebitda compared to the telecom business and allowed me to add capacities across multiple cities,” says Gupta, who set up nine data centres until 2009, when he moved on.
Till 2013, data centres were not the talk of the town in India. Soon, the digital wave triggered by ecommerce, 4G, and social media, among others, led companies to set up availability zones (separated group of data centres within a region). Around 2016, global giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google started building their data centres in the country. Simultaneously, Gupta launched India’s largest data centre in Mumbai’s Chandivali while working with the NTT Group. This earned him the moniker of the ‘data centre man of India’.
Eighteen years after building, managing, expanding, and running the data centres for Reliance and NTT, Gupta could foresee the boom coming up in India. In 2019, real-estate billionaire Niranjan Hiranandani got interested in investing in this sector. Having worked with them in the past and being a part of the same social circle, Gupta took this opportunity and approached Hiranandani with a business idea.
(This story appears in the 14 June, 2024 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)