Global Capability Centres in India January 2026
India’s Global Capability Centre (GCC) story has moved well beyond the “offshore back‑office” narrative. As 2026 begins, the country has firmly established itself as the world’s GCC capital, hosting a large share of global centres and delivering increasingly complex work in AI, R&D, product engineering and financial innovation.
This January, a cluster of high‑signal announcements—KLA’s new R&D hub in Chennai, Western Union and HCLTech’s AI‑led GCC in Hyderabad, State Bank of India’s first GCC in Bengaluru, and Deloitte’s 50,000‑hire India plan—offer a sharp lens on where the ecosystem is headed. Alongside this, a growing body of commentary is flagging a new concern: retaining top‑tier engineering and AI talent in an overheated market.
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India GCC Landscape as of Early 2026
Over the past decade, India has quietly become the default location of choice for multinational GCCs. By early 2026, the country hosts well over a thousand GCCs across technology, BFSI, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and consumer brands. Independent estimates suggest India now accounts for more than half of the world’s GCCs by number, a share that has been steadily rising as global enterprises consolidate scattered regional centres into larger India hubs.
These centres are no longer concentrated in a single city. Bengaluru remains the flagship GCC market, but Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai, NCR and rapidly emerging Tier‑II cities have created a dense, multi‑city corridor of global delivery, product development and innovation. Many global firms now operate multiple GCCs across India—using, for instance, Bengaluru for engineering, Hyderabad for data and AI, and Pune for operations and risk.
Equally important is the functional shift. The typical India GCC is no longer a pure back‑office or shared‑services unit. Centres now span:
- Product and platform engineering
- Cloud, data and AI/ML
- Risk, cyber and regulatory functions in BFSI
- Embedded systems and ER&D for semiconductors, automotive and aerospace
- Clinical data management and digital health in life sciences
January’s announcements fit squarely within this higher‑value, innovation‑centric India GCCs model.
Global Capability Centres in India January 2026
January 2026 produced several high‑impact Global Capability Centres (GCC) developments that illustrate where the ecosystem is headed. These are the key announcements to know.
KLA Chennai GCC investment details 2026
On 7 January 2026, semiconductor process‑control leader KLA Corporation announced the opening of a major R&D and Innovation Hub in Chennai, with an investment of ₹300 crore and a campus of over 300,000 square feet.
According to the company, the centre will:
- House up to roughly 1,300 employees at full capacity.
- Focus on software, AI, algorithms and advanced engineering that power KLA’s global inspection and metrology systems.
- Integrate with KLA’s existing presence at the IIT Madras Research Park and its global R&D network across the US, Europe and Asia.
This hub is not a generic IT back office; it is an ER&D‑heavy GCC in a sector India is aggressively trying to build—semiconductors. It strengthens Chennai’s position as a rising hub for deep‑tech Global Capability Centres and underscores how global industrial and semiconductor leaders are betting on Indian engineering talent for their next wave of innovation.
Western Union and HCLTech Expand GCC Footprint to Hyderabad
Western Union, in partnership with HCLTech, has announced the expansion of its Global Capability Centres footprint to Hyderabad, adding to its existing tech presence in Pune.
The new Hyderabad centre is positioned as:
- A state‑of‑the‑art, AI‑led innovation hub for Western Union’s global operations.
- A core engine for modernising payments infrastructure, enhancing digital customer experiences, and building next‑generation platform capabilities.
- A showcase for HCLTech’s AI‑powered platforms, including solutions like AI Force™, to accelerate software delivery and operations.
Strategically, this move signals two important shifts:
- BFSI GCCs are becoming AI‑first. Payments and remittances depend heavily on real‑time risk scoring, fraud detection, personalisation and compliance—areas where AI can dramatically shift both performance and cost.
- Indian IT services firms are evolving into GCC orchestrators. Rather than simply staffing projects, partners like HCLTech are now building and managing end‑to‑end GCC environments for global clients.
SBI Opens Its First‑Ever Global Capability Centres in Bengaluru
In a landmark move for India’s domestic financial sector, State Bank of India (SBI) has opened its first‑ever Global Capability Centre in Bengaluru.
This development matters for several reasons:
- SBI becomes one of the first major Indian banks to formally adopt the GCC construct for its own technology and operations transformation. This puts it structurally closer to how global banks run digital, analytics and risk capabilities.
- As part of the same initiative, SBI has opened 11 new branches in Bengaluru and set up a dedicated relationship‑management team focused specifically on serving the banking needs of GCCs operating in the city.
- SBI is also pairing this expansion with broader social and infrastructure investments in Karnataka—upgrading government schools, supporting medical infrastructure at IISc, and launching environmental initiatives—strengthening its position as a “local partner” to a global GCC ecosystem.
In effect, SBI’s GCC is both a capability play (modernising its own technology and operations from within India’s tech capital) and a franchise play (banking the GCC ecosystem as a client segment).
Deloitte’s 50,000‑Hire Plan and the Rise of Tier‑II GCC Hubs
Mid‑January saw another headline announcement: Deloitte plans to hire around 50,000 new employees in India, on top of an existing India workforce that already runs into six figures.
Two angles stand out:
- Scale and centrality of India: One in every four Deloitte employees worldwide is already in or from India. With this new hiring plan, the firm is explicitly signalling that it intends to push that ratio even higher, making India the backbone of its global delivery and GCC strategy across audit, tax, consulting and risk.
- Tier‑II city focus: Deloitte is actively evaluating Mangaluru as a future expansion location and has highlighted other Tier‑II cities like Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Indore and Jaipur as strong candidates for future GCC growth. Lower attrition, competitive salary bands and improving infrastructure make these cities attractive complements to saturated metros.
This strategy reflects a broader industry trend: the geographical de‑concentration of India GCCs work within India. Rather than clustering everything in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, large firms are now designing multi‑node networks that combine metro depth with Tier‑II resilience.
Other GCCs India Related Stories
- Growth of GCC companies in Indian Metros and Tier-II Cities 2025 Beyond
- H1-B Visa Shock – Leading GCC Companies in India 2025 Beyond
- Global Capability Centres in India: A Strategic Hub for Innovation and Excellence
- How India’s Best GCC companies Lead the Way in Tech, Finance, Pharma, and Beyond
- Investing in Global Capability Centres in India with Best-Listed Companies
India budget 2026: India GCCs safe harbour tax benefits
India’s Union Budget 2026, presented on January 31, delivers concrete measures that directly amplify the GCC ecosystem’s growth trajectory. While not exclusively a “GCC budget,” the reforms tackle longstanding structural hurdles—tax uncertainty, compliance complexity, and infrastructure bottlenecks—positioning India as an even more compelling destination for global multinationals to deepen their India commitments.
Key India GCCs – Relevant Announcements
- Expanded Safe Harbour Framework for Transfer Pricing
The budget significantly raises the eligibility threshold for safe harbour rules from ₹300 crore to ₹2,000 crore in operating revenue, while introducing a uniform 15.5% profit margin across IT services (replacing fragmented 17–24% service-specific margins). Approvals are now fully automated and rules-based, with the margin locked in for five years.- This eliminates recurring tax audits and disputes, giving global HQ confidence to assign higher-complexity mandates—AI, R&D, product engineering—to India GCCs without fearing transfer pricing challenges. Industry leaders note it “ends the challenging tax overhang” for large-scale operations.
- Unified Classification for IT and Tech Services
Software development, IT-enabled services, KPO, and contract R&D are now consolidated under a single “information technology services” category, streamlining compliance and boosting predictability. - Digital Infrastructure and Skilling Push
Enhanced incentives for data centres, GPU infrastructure, and “digital economic zones” align directly with GCC needs for AI/compute-heavy workloads. The budget also extends APA (Advance Pricing Agreement) benefits to associated entities, widening relief beyond single companies.
These measures support Tier-II expansions (like Deloitte’s Mangaluru play) by co-locating talent, startups, and compute power, compressing GCC setup from months to weeks.
India GCCs: A USD 100 Billion‑Plus Trajectory
While official FDI numbers do not always break GCC investments out separately, it is clear from multiple industry studies that the economic value of GCC work delivered from India already runs into tens of billions of dollars annually, and is on a trajectory towards the USD 100‑billion‑plus mark by the end of this decade.
Three dimensions matter here:
- Direct capex: New centres require large upfront outlays in real estate, fit‑outs, labs, data centres and connectivity. Semiconductor and ER&D‑heavy GCCs, in particular, need specialised labs, clean rooms and advanced testing infrastructure, translating into high capex per employee.
- Operating expenditure: Salaries, training, cloud infrastructure, local vendor contracts and ecosystem partnerships generate recurring annual spend, much of which circulates within India.
- Exported value of work: Perhaps the most important metric is the value of global work executed from India—software products shipped, financial and risk processes run, R&D milestones achieved, AI models built and maintained. This is effectively a high‑skill “services export,” even when the GCC itself is not a third‑party vendor.
As more GCCs move up the value chain—from back office to core product and R&D ownership—the value‑per‑employee curve continues to rise. This is precisely why recent announcements, such as KLA’s R&D and innovation hub in Chennai and Western Union’s AI‑led GCC in Hyderabad, are more significant than a similar number of generic support roles.
Why India GCCs Are Struggling to Retain Top Tech Talent
Alongside these expansion announcements, January also sharpened industry focus on a key vulnerability: retaining top‑tier technology and AI talent in India’s GCCs.
An insightful analysis published by ET Edge Insights asks a blunt question:
Why are India’s Global Capability Centres struggling to hold on to their best engineers and architects?
The piece highlights several core issues:
- Attrition is concentrated at the top end. While overall GCC attrition has cooled, the churn among high‑end talent in AI, cloud, systems architecture and product engineering is significantly higher than the average.
- Execution without ownership. Many India GCC teams handle mission‑critical systems and processes, yet strategic decisions—roadmaps, architecture calls, product direction—remain tightly controlled at global headquarters. The result is an “ownership gap”: engineers feel responsible for outcomes without having real authority.
- Employment vs career. GCCs have optimised well for stable employment—competitive salaries, benefits, ESOPs—but not always for “compounding careers” where scope, decision‑making and problem complexity grow every year.
Final Words: India GCCs January 2026
The article argues that the GCCs winning the talent war in India are those that:
- Give Indian teams end‑to‑end ownership of products or platforms, not just execution fragments.
- Involve engineers early in architectural and design trade‑offs.
- Invest in hands‑on AI/ML exposure, not just theoretical training.
- Build talent pipelines from institutions and programmes that prioritise project‑based, production‑grade learning.
For a monthly GCC tracker, this is a critical counterbalance to the expansion headlines: the battle for talent is now the single biggest gating factor for how fast and how far India’s GCC story can scale.