IT sector major HCLTech bets big on Sovereign AI. The company will buy 10.46% stake in government-backed sovereign AI model developer Sarvam AI for Rs 1,427 crore. Sarvam is India’s full stack sovereign AI company. The transaction, which values Sarvam AI at $1.5 billion, is expected to close within two weeks of signing the agreement.
According to the HCLTech regulatory filing, the transaction does not require any regulatory approval. Sarvam AI is building the foundational model of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India’s full-stack Sovereign AI platform across research, models, infrastructure, and applications, built to advance AI for all of India.
HCLTech: Objectives and impact of acquiring Sarvam
HCLTech will leverage and expand Sarvam’s multilingual AI capabilities in India and beyond India for both sovereign AI initiatives and enterprise deployments across global markets.
As per the HCLTech regulatory filing, “The investment will enable HCLTech to develop industry and client-specific language models and AI solutions for its global client base, delivering compelling price-to-performance outcomes and enabling differentiated enterprise AI solutions across industries.”
C Vijayakumar, CEO & Managing Director of HCLTech said, “By bringing together Sarvam’s research in AI models with HCLTech’s global presence, we are creating a differentiated full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments, strengthening our ability to deliver secure, scalable, and responsible AI solutions.”
Understanding the Sarvam model
Sarvam AI is India’s leading AI company based out of Bangalore. It builds advanced AI models for text and other formats. The company creates AI products for businesses, developers, and government agencies.
The four key industries that the AI company focuses on include banking, insurance, government technology, and defence. Sarvam works on language, speech, vision, and documents, and all their models are built from the ground up in India. In the last few months, it has released foundational models, all trained from scratch in India.
Sarvam’s deployments are also creating impact at population scale. With multilingual voice agents, Sarvam’s platform collected high-quality data from 17 million farmers providing deep insights to the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer’s Welfare. For one of India’s leading insurance providers, a nationwide voice campaign supported low cost policy renewals for 45 million
policyholders.
“We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI. The partnership with HCLTech provides a unique example of an Indian corporate helping build foundational strength in AI,” said Vivek Raghavan, Co-Founder of Sarvam.
Sarvam AI reported revenue of Rs 45.1 crore in FY26.
Deal to accelerate adoption of AI solutions for governments
Speaking on the acquisition, HCLTech stated that this independent investment by HCLTech will fund Sarvam’s continued research and development for training its next-generation frontier models for agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity use cases, as well as access to compute at scale to expand its deployment across key industry verticals.
The deal is expected to accelerate the development and adoption of sovereign AI solutions for governments, regulated industries, and enterprises seeking localised, secure, and compliant AI deployments.
Sarvam fund raising details
HCLTech is investing Rs 1,427 crore or $150 million, into Sarvam. Sarvam is raising $300 million at post-money valuation of $1.5bn. Along with HCLTec, private equity and venture capital companies like Peak XI, Bessemer Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures invested in this round.
HCLTech share price
The HCLTech share price surged closed to 3% in early trade on June 16. However, the IT sector stock has declined nearly 30% this year so far.
About HCLTech
HCLTech is a global technology company with presence across 60 countries, delivering industry-leading capabilities centered around AI, digital, engineering, cloud and software, powered by a broad portfolio of technology services and products.