Lenovo is positioning India as a key pillar of its global infrastructure strategy, with plans to design and manufacture artificial intelligence servers in the country for both domestic deployment and international export. Speaking on the sidelines of CES 2026, Scott Tease, Vice President and General Manager of Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, said the company will rely on its Bengaluru development lab to design next-generation AI server systems, while manufacturing will be handled at its Pondicherry facility.
“We are going to be designing a lot of our one- and two-socket systems… think of those as the workhorses of AI in the future. We are going to be designing them in India,” Tease said, underscoring the strategic importance of Indian engineering talent in Lenovo’s global roadmap. These systems are expected to form the backbone of AI workloads, particularly as enterprises adopt more distributed and hybrid computing models.
Tease explained that Lenovo’s ambitions extend well beyond meeting local demand. “Once we have designed and engineered them, we are going to be manufacturing them there as well. It is going to be an important part of Lenovo’s value chain,” he said. While the company’s immediate focus remains “India for India,” he made it clear that exports are firmly on the horizon. “There is no reason at all that the future is going to hold us building servers in India for the rest of the world. Absolutely no reason whatsoever.” Lenovo India’s inclusion under the ₹17,000-crore IT hardware production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme further strengthens its manufacturing push in the country.
Beyond hardware, Tease also shared Lenovo’s perspective on how AI adoption is likely to unfold across India’s vast MSME sector. He noted that hybrid AI models offer a practical and cost-effective pathway, allowing businesses to avoid heavy upfront infrastructure investments. “Building a model might require something heavy…, but we can outsource that to cloud providers or GPU-as-a-service providers in India… who can help build the model,” he said, adding that day-to-day inferencing can run on significantly lighter systems.
Tease also praised India’s emphasis on Sovereign AI and energy-efficient innovations such as liquid cooling, calling them important long-term advantages. However, he stressed that talent will be the ultimate differentiator. “It is access to talent, for sure… the winners are going to be those regions, those companies, those governments that help their people embrace AI as part of what they do.”
