India’s data centre boom is breathing new life into the network equipment and solutions segment, with service providers reporting stronger order books and a sharp rise in net profits in FY26. Industry leaders say this momentum is likely to sustain into the next fiscal, driven by continued demand for digital infrastructure.
After muted performance in FY25, HFCL Ltd, Sterlite Technologies Ltd (STL) and Tejas Networks have reported considerable growth in FY26, with all three companies citing data centre and AI infrastructure demand as the driving force.
Earlier, businessline had reported that India stands to gain from geopolitical shifts in West Asia by emerging as a regional hub for cloud infrastructure, amid increasing demand from hyperscalers. With players like Google Cloud laying the foundation for a $15 billion data centre in April, network solution providers are now beginning to reflect the impact of these large-scale projects in their financial performance.
“The demand for the solution providers can continue for the next couple of years as there is huge demand for the data centre business in India. Whether this demand sustains remains to be seen but at present there is no disruption in this line,” said Kranthi Bathini, Director, Equity Strategy at WealthMills Securities, noting the early phase of the data centre business.
HFCL
HFCL too estimated such solutions businesses to contribute about ₹400 crore additional revenue in financial year 2027 and about ₹800 crore in financial year 2028. The company reported an all-time high order book of ₹ 21,200 crore in Q4 FY26 – a 112 per cent increase compared to FY25 – led by the optical fibre cable business. Its net profit in Q4 FY26 stood at ₹184.45 crore, overcoming its losses in the same quarter last year, while revenue grew to ₹1,824 crore, an annual growth of 128 per cent.
During its earnings call, HFCL said hyperscale data centres, artificial intelligence workloads and cloud infrastructure expansion are driving a structural transformation in the global optical fibre market. The company reported strong traction in its data centre interconnect solutions including pre-connectorised systems, which are crucial for high-density AI infrastructure deployments.
“Data centre inter-connectivity business will increase our revenue significantly this year and next year we have a very robust performance in front of us,” said Mahendra Nahata, Managing Director at HFCL.
Despite the huge growth, management is now hesitant to take up new orders beyond ₹200-500 crore due to capacity constraints and plans to increase its manufacturing capacities multifold.
“Now ₹18,000 crore of orders is in hand but we keep on receiving regular orders. We have very sustainable growth with this order book,” said Nahata.
Sterlite Technologies
STL too reported an impressive order book that doubled in FY 2026 to ₹7,687 crore, up 109 per cent year-on-year from ₹3,672 crore in FY 2025. Like HFCL, STL also turned its loss from a year ago into a net profit of ₹59 crore. Overall revenue grew by 36.9 per cent to ₹1,441 crore.
The management attributed this growth to strategic wins in large scale data centre projects, predominantly in North America, and long-term orders from tier one telecom operators in India.
“With accelerating AI data centre investments and pipeline visibility, we expect the enterprise and data centre segment to scale up to 30 per cent of revenues in the current fiscal,” said Ajay Jhanjhari, Chief Financial Officer.
STL further noted that AI workloads are creating dense fibre interconnections, exponentially increasing fibre per rack further spurring demand.
Tejas Networks
Tejas Networks’ order book stood at ₹1,514 crore, an annual growth of 49 per cent, despite a loss of ₹211 crore and reduced revenue of ₹333 crore owing to delayed customer projects in the quarter ended March 31, 2026.
The company received strong traction for its 400G/800G optic fibre solutions in telco and carrier of carrier networks to serve the surging bandwidth demand for 5G backhaul, enterprise and data centre connectivity, as per Arnob Roy, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer at Tejas Networks.
While the company did not explore its data centre prospects at length, it expects AI will drive a “Network Infrastructure Build Supercycle.” Particularly, the company said that edge compute and access networks will significantly scale its optical solutions, packet switching and routing and convergence business.
“The data centre connectivity will go to multi-terabit scale, which is already scaling up to that level, but is going to scale up significantly to provide for the AI cloud interconnect,” said Roy.
Published on May 3, 2026