American multinational Carrier Global is betting big on India. The company is investing $100 million in Sri City in Andhra Pradesh to set up a new facility to manufacture air conditioners. The state's IT minister, Naru Loes, laid the foundation stone for the plant, which promises to generate 3,000 jobs. Valued at $60 billion, Carrier Global is a leading energy solutions major, operating in 160 countries with around 53,000 employees. The company generates $22 billion in annual revenue. David Gitlin has been the chairman and CEO since 2019. Under his leadership, the company's market cap has grown five times from $12 billion to $60 billion. Facing pressure in the Chinese market, the company is setting its sights on India for expansion and is hoping to ride the AI wave through the boom in data centers. I spoke to David Gitlin to find out more about the company's blueprint for growth in India and the outlook for the rest of the world.
Before I talk to you about Carrier's global growth forecast, let me double down on your plans for India. Sri City in Andhra Pradesh is where you've decided to set up a 39-acre manufacturing facility. $100 million is what you intend to invest there. Let's start with your plans for India.
Well, look, we could not be more excited to expand our footprint in India. You know, we've been selling into India for close to a century. Our first facility here, our first building was back in 1936. And we were the first in our industry to establish operations here 40 years ago. We're celebrating our 40 years of operations here. We started in Gurgaon. And the beauty of our presence here is it's really an end-to-end value chain. So we have operations and manufacturing and supply chain up in Gurgaon. We have significant engineering in Gurgaon as well as Hyderabad and Bangalore. We have significant operations with our JV partner in Pune. And now we are very proud to announce this $100 million investment in Sri City which will be a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility and it really builds out our presence. The growth that we've been seeing in India is unlike any country that we have around the world. Our CAGR over the last four years has been 20%. We grew 33% in the first quarter. So the growth potential here is significant. We've been realizing it but we cannot keep up with that growth without a complete localization and without significantly expanding our footprint.
Well, congratulations on 40 years and congratulations on your new facility that you intend to set up in Sri City in Andhra Pradesh. When is that likely to be operational, David, and will it also focus on demand for the export market?
It'll be operational in the third quarter of next year. So we're doing an accelerated schedule and the answer is yes. We not only plan to have the facility for the capacity that we need here in India but we plan to export to Africa, parts of the Middle East, and then we'll see where it goes from there. But because we have not only a state-of-the-art factory, we're going to surround it with a complete supply chain ecosystem. Today up by Gurgaon we have about 200 suppliers. We're going to need three or four times that number in Sri City. So it'll be tremendously state-of-the-art. It'll be a complete community of suppliers and I think it'll be perfect not only for India but for the region.
You know, you talked about the supply chain ecosystem and this is something that the government has also been focusing on. Lay out for us how many suppliers we're likely to see move to Sri City, to Andhra Pradesh, as part of this ecosystem that you spoke of.
You know, today the number of suppliers we have in Gurgaon is about 200. We're probably going to need about three times that in Sri City. And part of the beauty of Sri City is a few things. Number one is by the end of next year about 50% of the air conditioning needs for India will be manufactured in Sri City. So it already has a robust supply chain. The other thing that really attracted us to the community is that it's within 100 kilometers of five different ports. So it's perfect for exporting to the local region as well.
Well, yes, you gave us an indication of the kind of export aspiration that you have. You know, given the fact that India is growing at a CAGR of 20%, that billion-dollar revenue number, David, on track to achieve that by 2030?
Yeah, we should definitely be at a billion dollars by 2030. When you look at the investments that are taking place in India, if you look at data centers alone today, it's about 1.12 gigawatts and you look at the announcements of not only the hyperscalers that we've seen folks like Microsoft and Google and AWS announce significant data center investments in India but also the colos folks like Colt and Reliance and so many others. So we see India going from 1 gigawatt to 10 gigawatts and you think about every gigawatt of investment in data centers is about $50 billion. So we see hyper growth in the data center market. We've seen that globally. We've certainly seen some phenomenal wins in the US and around the world. And we think one of the most exciting growth vectors that we have globally for data centers is right here in India. But it's not just data centers. That's one of the beauties when you have a GDP CAGR of 7% or so consistent growth and we look at investments in commercial real estate and hospitals and hospitality and so many verticals. Once you start building data centers that brings with it things like chip manufacturing. So not only direct data centers but the amount of urbanization that we're seeing in India and the amount of growth in so many other vectors. We think 20% CAGR is a minimum in India. What we try not to think about is CAGRs. We try to think about growing the business 2x, 3x over a short period of time. So today we're about $500 million of sales. I have no doubt that we'll be hitting that billion-dollar mark before the end of 2029.
Okay. Before the end of 2029. You know, I want to get a little bit more color from you on the data center business because your data center cooling business hit a billion in 2025. Given the accelerated pace of expansion, the jaw-dropping capex numbers from the hyperscalers and others, what is the outlook for the data center business?
It's tremendous. You know, we two years ago Carrier did $500 million. We said that last year we would double it to a billion. This year we've said it's going to increase 50% to a billion and a half. And the reality is internally we're driving to do a much better number than that. And we're building our backlog not only for '27 but for '28. So the growth potential in the United States, but honestly globally, it's kind of a once-in-a-generation opportunity when you look at this data center opportunity. And one thing that Carrier's done is invest in innovation. So we now have a complete product portfolio. We have things like two and three megawatt mag bearing chillers that are perfect for the data center market. We have water-cooled chillers that we'll be making here in India for the local market as well, both air-cooled and water-cooled chillers. And then we look at a lot of the differentiation is through systems integration and intelligence. So we have an offering at Carrier that we call Quantum Leap which is the integration of what were formerly disparate systems. So traditional cooling, liquid cooling, a building management system, a data center infrastructure management system. Putting that all together in a way that minimizes water usage, minimizes energy consumption, and really creates the state-of-the-art efficiency that our customers expect. So, we see we're in the early innings of this data center growth, and we think it's going to continue for years to come.
I want to get back to your plans for India and while you give us some guidance there as far as your manufacturing operations are concerned, walk us through the plans for the engineering centers you've got in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Gurgaon as you pointed out. Are you looking at hiring more and what kind of work is happening at these engineering centers? How much of the IP-driven work is happening at your engineering centers in India?
It's absolutely tremendous. In fact, just before we arrived in Mumbai, we were in Hyderabad and we have 1,600 professionals in Hyderabad and it's a combination of digital and engineering and some back office work as well where we've consolidated a lot of our back office activity that does record to report and some of our payables activity right here in Hyderabad. So the kind of skill sets that we're looking at spans the gamut of electrical engineer, software engineer, mechanical engineering, systems engineering and on the digital side, we have an entire department dedicated to AI. We use Hyderabad as a center of excellence globally. So the kind of work that's being done in Hyderabad, both on the engineering side and on the digital side, are centers of excellence for the world. So a lot of the software development and electrical engineering that we do globally is done right here in Hyderabad and we're going to keep building to it. It was just a few years ago we had a thousand people in Hyderabad. Today it's about 1,600 and we see the growth potential because of the skills that we have there. We see that continuing to grow and frankly our retention has been very, very good because we've created a work environment where people want to be a part of our mission because we're a very purpose-driven company. We want to be there for our customers, but we want to be there for the planet for generations to come. So, we do a lot of community activities. We do tree planting activities. So, when we recruit from the local universities, it speaks to them because our mission speaks to them.
I want to talk to you about what's happening globally, David. We are in the midst of the West Asia conflict. And that has of course led to oil prices surging close to $120 a barrel. It has led to raw material costs going up. What has that meant as far as your business is concerned?
