BENGALURU: In a big-ticket bet, Blackstone is leading a $1.2 billion funding round in AI cloud platform Neysa, bolstering the company’s push to build large-scale AI infrastructure. Blackstone and its co-investors committed up to $600 million in equity, with the company planning to secure an additional $600 million in debt financing, subject to documentation. Other equity investors include Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 One Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners.Following the investment, the private equity giant will hold a majority stake in the homegrown AI platform. The funding is expected to accelerate Neysa’s expansion plans, including scaling its GPU capacity in India to over 20,000 from about 1,200 currently, backing the country’s AI buildout. Neysa’s AI cloud platform enables enterprises, startups, and PSUs to securely and cost-effectively deploy and scale AI workloads. Neysa, which counts Justpay, Swiggy, and Perfios as key customers, previously raised $50 million.Sharad Sanghi, cofounder of Neysa, said the planned deployment of 20,000 GPUs aligns with India’s sovereign AI push. “India’s AI mission is enabling foundational model training by research institutions and private companies. Enterprises increasingly want sovereign AI to ensure data remains within the country, with many financial institutions opting for air-gapped GPUs or private cloud setups-both of which we support. We see strong demand from enterprises, startups, govt bodies, research institutions, and global frontier labs driving rapid growth. With roughly 50,000-60,000 GPUs in India today, we expect that number rises sharply over the next few years.” Following the tax holiday, he said global frontier labs are also increasingly exploring the establishment of inferencing clusters in India. Sanghi, who previously cofounded Netmagic with Anindya Das in 1998 with the goal of becoming India’s premier managed hosting service provider, sold the company to Japanese telecom giant NTT Communications in 2012.
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Ganesh Mani, senior managing director at Blackstone Private Equity, told TOI that it is among the largest investors in AI infrastructure globally and a major owner of data centres, with investments spanning the entire value chain-from cloud platforms to AI labs. “In India, the GPU infrastructure market is still nascent at about 60,000 units, but we believe it could expand nearly 30-fold to around 2 million in a short period. We are backing what we view as the No 1 management team in this space, with proven technical capabilities and customer validation. Beyond capital, we bring access to our global ecosystem, help secure critical supply chains such as data centre capacity and GPUs, and support go-to-market efforts,” Mani said. With Neysa raising $600 million in debt, TOI asked about the risks of using GPUs as collateral for high-interest loans. Sanghi said the exposure is largely mitigated by strong contracts, often with AAA-rated companies. He added that while global financing against GPUs can reach loan-to-value ratios of 85%-90%, the company is adopting a more conservative stance at around 50%. Apart from scaling to 20,000 GPUs, Neysa said its roadmap includes enhancing its orchestration platform, expanding its applications marketplace, strengthening security, and building an observability layer to efficiently manage tens of thousands of GPUs. Sanghi added that the company plans to hire talent to support its infrastructure buildout, including systems engineers, network and storage specialists, software developers, and GenAI experts.
