Blackstone backs Neysa in up to $1.2B financing as India pushes to build domestic AI infrastructure

Neysa, an India-based AI infrastructure startup, has landed support from U.S. private equity giant Blackstone as it works to expand domestic compute capacity amid India’s broader effort to develop homegrown AI capabilities.

Blackstone and a group of co-investors — including Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners — have agreed to commit up to $600 million in primary equity to Neysa. This deal would give Blackstone a majority stake, Blackstone and Neysa said. The Mumbai-headquartered company also intends to raise an additional $600 million in debt financing to accelerate GPU expansion, a major increase from the roughly $50 million the startup had raised previously.

The financing arrives as global demand for AI compute continues to surge, tightening the supply of specialised chips and the data centre capacity required to train and run large models. A new wave of AI-first infrastructure providers, often called “neo-clouds”, has emerged to fill the gap by offering dedicated GPU capacity and quicker rollout than traditional hyperscalers, especially for enterprises and AI labs that face regulatory requirements, latency constraints, or customisation needs.

Neysa is operating in this fast-growing category, positioning itself as a customised, GPU-first infrastructure provider for enterprises, government bodies, and AI developers across India, where local compute demand is still in its early stages but is rising quickly.

“A lot of customers want handholding, and a lot of them want round-the-clock support with a 15-minute response and a couple of our resolutions. And so those are the kinds of things that we provide that some of the hyperscalers don’t,” said Neysa co-founder and CEO Sharad Sanghi.

Ganesh Mani, a senior managing director at Blackstone Private Equity, said Blackstone estimates India currently has fewer than 60,000 GPUs deployed, and expects that number to grow nearly 30x to more than 2 million over the coming years.

Mani said that growth is being fueled by a mix of government demand, enterprises in regulated sectors such as financial services and healthcare that need to keep data within the country, and domestic AI developers training and deploying models in India. At the same time, global AI labs — many of which count India among their largest user markets — are increasingly seeking to place compute closer to users to reduce latency and satisfy data requirements.

The investment also fits within Blackstone’s wider global push into data centres and AI infrastructure. The firm has previously backed large data centre platforms, including QTS and AirTrunk, and it has invested in specialised AI infrastructure providers such as CoreWeave in the U.S. and Firmus in Australia.

Neysa builds and operates GPU-based AI infrastructure that help enterprises, researchers, and public-sector organisations train, fine-tune, and deploy AI models locally. The startup currently has around 1,200 GPUs live and plans to significantly scale that figure, targeting deployments of more than 20,000 GPUs as demand grows.

“We are seeing a demand that we are going to more than triple our capacity next year,” Sanghi said. “Some of the conversations we are having are at a fairly advanced stage; if they go through, then we could see it sooner rather than later. We could see in the next nine months.”

Sanghi said most of the fresh funding will go toward rolling out large-scale GPU clusters — including compute, networking, and storage — while a smaller portion will be directed to research and development and expanding Neysa’s software platforms focused on orchestration, observability, and security.

Neysa said it expects to more than triple revenue next year as AI workloads accelerate, and it has ambitions to expand beyond India over time, Sanghi added. Founded in 2023, the company employs 110 people across offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai.