Zoho has unveiled Nathu La, an India‑designed and India‑built server platform developed in Nagpur, marking the company’s most ambitious push into hardware as AI workloads drive global infrastructure costs sharply upward. The platform is designed to reduce data‑centre and AI spending, improve efficiency, and give Zoho tighter control over its full technology stack.
Zoho’s engineering team built Nathu La in collaboration with Intel, using Intel Xeon 6 processors. According to the company, the server delivers comparable performance to leading global vendors while reducing power consumption by 12–18% and lowering total cost of ownership by 20–30%. These savings, Zoho says, will become increasingly important as AI inference and training workloads continue to expand.
Zoho is not commercialising the platform for now. Instead, it is deploying Nathu La across its own data centres, which support more than 150 million global users. The company has been testing the platform for nearly a year and has already begun limited production deployments. Early results show that Nathu La performs especially well in transaction processing, video collaboration, and document‑storage workloads.
A key part of the initiative is Zoho’s investment in domestic hardware talent. The company built a pipeline through its SETU (Student Engagement for Transformative Upskilling) programme, which trains engineering students from their fifth semester. Most of the engineers behind Nathu La were recruited through this initiative, joining Zoho as freshers and working on the project end‑to‑end.
The move also reflects Zoho’s strategic goal of reducing reliance on overseas server vendors such as Dell, HPE and Lenovo. As AI adoption accelerates, Zoho aims to optimise its applications, strengthen sovereignty over its infrastructure, and build long‑term resilience.