Blackstone backs Neysa in up to $1.2B financing as India pushes to build domestic AI compute

Neysa, an Indian AI infrastructure startup, has secured backing from U.S. private equity firm Blackstone as it scales domestic compute capacity amid India's push to build homegrown AI capabilities. Blackstone and co-investors, including Teachers' Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset and Nexus Venture Partners, have agreed to invest up to $600 million of primary equity in Neysa, giving Blackstone a majority stake, Blackstone and Neysa told TechCrunch. The Mumbai-headquartered startup also plans to raise an additional $600 million in debt financing as it expands GPU capacity, a sharp increase from the $50 million it had raised previously. Neysa develops and operates GPU-based AI infrastructure that enables enterprises, researchers and public sector clients to train, fine-tune and deploy AI models locally. The startup currently has about 1,200 GPUs live and plans to sharply scale that capacity, targeting deployments of more than 20,000 GPUs over time as customer demand accelerates. Co-founder and CEO Sharad Sanghi said the company is seeing demand that will more than triple its capacity next year. Ganesh Mani, a senior managing director at Blackstone Private Equity, said his firm estimates that India currently has fewer than 60,000 GPUs deployed and expects the figure to scale up nearly 30 times to more than 2 million in the coming years. That expansion is being driven by a combination of government demand, enterprises in regulated sectors such as financial services and healthcare that need to keep data local, and AI developers building models within India, Mani told TechCrunch. Global AI labs are also increasingly looking to deploy computing capacity closer to users to reduce latency and meet data requirements. Sanghi told TechCrunch that the bulk of the new capital will be used to deploy large-scale GPU clusters, including compute, networking and storage, while a smaller portion will go toward research and development and building out Neysa's software platforms for orchestration, observability and security. Neysa aims to more than triple its revenue next year as demand for AI workloads accelerates, with ambitions to expand beyond India over time. Founded in 2023, the startup employs 110 people across offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai.