The Infrastructure Prophet: How Sharad Sanghi Built India's Digital Backbone Twice
At 56, after a successful exit, most entrepreneurs would retire. Instead, Sharad Sanghi saw ChatGPT and started over.
The phone calls started in early 2023. Clients of NTT's Simply Cloud were asking the same question: could they run AI workloads on the existing infrastructure? Sharad Sanghi, then running NTT's global data center operations, knew the answer was more complex than a simple yes or no.
"We were getting requests for customers for AI workloads and they were saying can you provide a GPU infrastructure as well."
Standing in his Mumbai office, surrounded by the hum of servers he'd spent decades perfecting, Sanghi faced a moment of recognition. The same pattern that had driven him to build India's first commercial data center in 1998 was repeating itself in 2023. Everyone was building AI applications. No one was building the specialized infrastructure to run them efficiently.
At 56, after selling his previous company for hundreds of millions and achieving everything most entrepreneurs dream of, Sanghi made a decision that surprised even his closest advisors. He would start over.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Accidental Internet Architect
To understand why Sanghi saw the AI infrastructure gap before others, you need to go back to the early 1990s, when he was a young engineer at Columbia University working on something called NSFNET - the precursor to the modern commercial internet.
I was fortunate to work on the first large backbone of the internet called the NSFNET... The main purpose of that backbone was to connect research and education institutions over a high speed network.
While his peers focused on applications and user interfaces, Sanghi was deep in the plumbing - configuring routers, managing IP addresses, building the invisible foundation that would eventually carry trillions of digital transactions. This experience at the core of internet infrastructure would prove prophetic.
When he returned to India in August 1995-the exact month commercial internet launched in the country-he brought a unique perspective. Working as a consultant to VSNL, India's internet monopoly, he quickly established himself as someone who could solve complex networking problems that others couldn't.
But it was what Sanghi observed in the market that set him apart from other technologists of his era.
Seeing What Others Missed
By 1998, when the Indian government finally allowed private internet service providers, a gold rush mentality had taken hold. Everyone wanted to connect consumers to the internet. Everyone except Sanghi.
Most of them were doing only dial up access or broadband access and catering to end users but nobody was really focusing on how internet could be used for mission critical business.
While competitors chased "eyeballs," Sanghi identified a fundamental infrastructure gap. Businesses needed reliable, secure, always-on environments to run their critical operations-something that couldn't be achieved in typical office server rooms.
His timing was impeccable. At a technology conference in Delhi, he met B.B. Jagdish, founder of Exodus Communications-the world's first internet data center company. Jagdish was intrigued by the young Indian engineer's vision and agreed to become an angel investor.
Given my background of NSFNET, etc., he took a liking to what I had to say and invited me to the US.
With $4 million in funding, Netmagic Solutions was born in July 1998, launching India's first commercial data center in October 2000.
Surviving the Crash, Building the Foundation
Within a year of launch, disaster struck. The dot-com bubble burst, taking down countless technology companies worldwide, including Exodus itself. But Sanghi had built Netmagic differently.
We did not waste money doing massive ads... We were in the B2B space. I don't understand the B2C space.
While competitors burned cash on billboards and Super Bowl ads, Netmagic focused relentlessly on profitability, achieving cash flow positive status within 13 months. This disciplined approach would define Sanghi's leadership philosophy for the next two decades.
The early 2000s were about education as much as infrastructure. Indian enterprises were reluctant to outsource their IT operations. It took natural disasters-the 2001 Bhuj earthquake and Mumbai floods-to demonstrate the vulnerability of in-house server rooms versus purpose-built data centers.
The real breakthrough came around 2007-2008 when banks, with their stringent security requirements, began adopting third-party data centers. If the most regulated industry in India trusted external infrastructure providers, others would follow.
The Hyperscaler Revolution
Everything changed in 2015. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud simultaneously entered the Indian market, transforming data centers from a niche enterprise service into critical national infrastructure.
Hyperscale came to India in 2015. That's when data centers became mainstream in India.
The demand explosion was unprecedented. By 2012, when NTT Communications acquired a 74% stake in Netmagic for $128 million, the company had grown to ₹150 crores in annual revenue, split across data centers (50%), managed services (25%), cloud computing (15%), and networking (10%).
Under NTT's ownership, Sanghi scaled the business to extraordinary proportions: 19 data centers, 300 megawatts of IT capacity, and combined revenues exceeding $400 million by the time he stepped back in 2023. At its peak, Netmagic controlled nearly 25% of India's total data center capacity.
The Second Act Begins
The ChatGPT moment in late 2022 triggered a familiar pattern recognition in Sanghi's mind. Just as businesses in 1998 needed specialized infrastructure to leverage the internet, enterprises in 2023 needed purpose-built platforms to harness artificial intelligence.
The difference this time was speed. Where Netmagic took years to raise its first rounds, Sanghi's new venture, Neysa, secured $20 million in seed funding in April 2024-one of India's largest seed rounds. Six months later, they raised another $30 million in Series A funding, bringing total capital to $50 million in their first operational year.
The economics of AI infrastructure are starkly different from traditional cloud computing. In Neysa's cost structure, GPUs and associated hardware represent 80% of expenses, with colocation and power accounting for just 17%-a complete inversion from traditional data centers.
When you're doing the pricing for a client roughly 80 percent of the cost is GPU and associated infrastructure and about 17% is colo power and network.
But the supply chain challenges are equally intense. Current-generation H200 chips can be procured within six weeks, but cutting-edge Blackwell GPUs have four-month lead times-assuming you can get an allocation at all.
The India AI Opportunity
The numbers behind India's AI transformation are staggering. The market is projected to explode from $2.7 billion in 2024 to $17-22 billion by 2027-a compound annual growth rate exceeding 25%. India's 420,000 AI professionals represent the world's second-largest talent pool, yet the country generates remarkably few AI patents relative to its human capital.
This presents both opportunity and existential challenge. India's traditional advantage in software services-labor arbitrage-is being eroded by AI tools that allow small teams to accomplish what previously required armies of developers.
Now we don't need a team of 100 people developing, we need a team of two or three people developing using these tools... that labor arbitrage is pretty much gone.
Sanghi sees this disruption as forcing a necessary evolution: from a services mindset to a product mindset, from building for others to building for the world.
The Philosophy of Infrastructure
What makes Sanghi unique among India's technology leaders is his consistent focus on foundational infrastructure over flashy applications. While others built the apps people see, he built the invisible systems that make everything else possible.
His leadership philosophy, refined over 30 years, is remarkably consistent. He's never laid off an employee across multiple economic downturns, preferring to invest in people during difficult periods rather than cut costs through workforce reductions.
I've never laid off an employee in my 25, 30 years of entrepreneurship. There have been tough times. We went through dotcom burst. We went through the 2008 financial crisis.
At Neysa, this people-first approach manifests in hiring decisions that prioritize capability over ego.
I hire people smarter than me. So all the people who report to me are smarter than me, especially in their domain... I don't want yes men.
The Infrastructure Prophet's Vision
Standing in an NTT data center in Mumbai, where Neysa's GPU clusters now connect directly to the traditional cloud infrastructure he built decades earlier, Sanghi embodies the bridge between technological eras.
We've done a cross connect between the two clouds... if a Simply Cloud customer wants GPUs, they can just orchestrate our GPUs as well.
It's a perfect metaphor for his career-always building connections between what exists and what's coming next, always focused on the foundational layer that enables innovation above.
At 58, when asked about the energy to start over, his answer reveals why infrastructure builders think differently than application developers.
It's such an exciting field, it's so much to learn... Just interacting with my team is constant learning. And if there was no learning, I would probably not have the energy to do this.
For entrepreneurs contemplating their own second acts, Sanghi's advice distills decades of pattern recognition into actionable wisdom:
Dream big... especially with AI, you've got this opportunity to create something for the world. You just don't have to look at India alone.
The infrastructure prophet has spoken. Again. And if his track record is any indication, the rest of us should listen carefully to what he's building next.
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