Indian multinational conglomerate Larsen & Toubro (L&T) has acquired a 21 percent stake in cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) company E2E.
In a transaction valued at Rs 1,327 crore ($157.4m), L&T will also integrate E2E's cloud platforms with its existing data center management and solutions services, and will colocate E2E in its data centers.
L&T will acquire a total of 4.17 million equity shares in E2E.
E2E has been offering access to cloud-based GPUs in India since 2018 and counts the likes of Zomato, CarDekho, 1mg, Junglee Games, and Purplle among its customers. Through its AI and machine learning platform TIR the company offers access to Nvidia A100s, H100s, and H200s.
Following the acquisition, L&T will be able to nominate up to two board members for E2E.
“Collaborating with E2E Networks allows us to offer our clients seamless, scalable and secure cloud experiences," said Seema Ambastha, chief executive of L&T data center and cloud business.
“The strategic collaboration between E2E and L&T marks a significant milestone for the future adoption of domestically built hyperscale cloud platforms in India,” said Tarun Dua, chairman and managing director of E2E.
Hasit Joshipura, adviser to the chairman of L&T Group told Economic Times (ET), that L&T builds half the data centers in India, operates data centers for some state governments, and also has a couple of IT management companies.
"The only space in which there was a gap was running its own data centers," Joshipura said to ET.
The company has gone on to set up a 2MW data center in Panvel, and according to its website has 30MW of capacity in Sriperumbudur near Chennai that went live in June. It is also developing facilities in Navi Mumbai and Bengaluru.
Both L&T and E2E are looking to bid for the upcoming IndiaAI Mission GPU tender that will see the acquisition of 10,000 GPUs.
In September 2024, L&T announced it would be investing more than $300 million to establish a fabless chip company in India. The company plans to design 15 products by the end of 2024 and begin selling them in 2027.
