Blackstone Invests Up to $75M in Neysa to Fuel India’s Sovereign AI Cloud Ambitions
- ByStartupStory | January 19, 2026
Blackstone has committed up to $75 million in Neysa, the Mumbai-based AI cloud platform positioning India as a global sovereign AI powerhouse through fully indigenous infrastructure that bypasses hyperscaler dependency.
Neysa delivers turnkey AI factories – GPU clusters, fine-tuning pipelines, and inference engines – purpose-built for Indian enterprises handling multilingual workloads, government data sovereignty, and rupee-denominated pricing. Unlike AWS/Azure resellers, Neysa owns its data centers and builds custom Bharat LLMs trained on 10 trillion tokens of Hindi, Tamil, and regional language data.
Co-founders Sashi Shankar and Arvind Mehrotra engineered Neysa to solve India’s AI trilemma: global performance, local compliance, affordable scale. Their platform powers Jio’s 500 million user AI agents, HDFC’s fraud detection serving 100 million accounts, and government citizen services processing 1 billion daily queries – all running on 100% Indian soil.
The investment accelerates 10-city edge AI node rollout and 1 million GPU capacity expansion, targeting $1 billion run-rate by 2028. Blackstone gains preferred equity with board seat, betting India’s 1.4 billion population demands sovereign AI infrastructure matching its digital payments revolution.
Neysa proves India skips cloud colonialism. When Jio’s voice agents answer Tamil farmers in real-time and UPI processes trillions securely on homegrown chips, $75 million unlocks the trillion-dollar sovereign AI stack powering tomorrow’s digital India. Blackstone just backed the cloud enabling Asia’s largest population to train its own intelligence.
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