Bharti Airtel is positioning financial services, data centres and cloud as the next major growth engines for the company, chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said in the telecom operator’s FY26 annual-report commentary.
The shift comes after Airtel invested more than Rs 3.3 lakh crore over the past decade in building digital infrastructure across India. Mittal said the company now intends to use that infrastructure base to expand into adjacent businesses that are closely linked to India’s rising demand for connectivity, digital payments, enterprise cloud, AI workloads and data localisation.
Airtel’s financial-services push is centred on Airtel Money, which has received approval from the Reserve Bank of India to operate as a non-deposit-taking non-banking financial company. Reports citing the annual report said Airtel Money will be capitalised over time, with Airtel seeking to use its customer reach, payments footprint and digital distribution capabilities to build the business.
The company’s data-centre business, Nxtra, is another key pillar. Nxtra has raised $1 billion, or about Rs 9,500 crore, and is working toward building 1 gigawatt of data-centre capacity over the next few years. The expansion is tied to structural demand drivers in India, including cloud adoption, enterprise digitisation, AI-led compute requirements and stricter expectations around local data storage.
Airtel is also scaling Airtel Cloud, its sovereign, telecom-grade cloud offering for Indian enterprises. According to Fortune India, Airtel Cloud has secured more than 24 cloud deals, while Airtel’s 5G subscriber base has reached 188 million. The company is positioning the cloud business as a response to demand from companies that want local, secure infrastructure backed by a domestic telecom network.
The strategic message is that Airtel is no longer treating telecom connectivity as its only growth platform. Its next phase is being built around infrastructure-led adjacencies where its network, customer base, enterprise relationships and balance sheet can be used together. For India, this matters because telecom operators are becoming important players in the country’s AI, cloud, fintech and data-centre stack, not just providers of mobile and broadband access.
The company also continues to argue for healthier telecom tariffs, with reports noting that “tariff repair” remains part of the broader operating context. That is relevant because Airtel’s ability to fund large-scale investments in 5G, data centres, cloud and financial services depends partly on sustained cash generation from its core mobility and enterprise businesses.
