8JANUARY, 2026LENOVO TO DESIGN, MANUFACTURE & EXPORT AI SERVERS FROM INDIAThe global tech company Lenovo has decided to make India a major export hub for its infrastructure business, mainly focusing on developing and producing AI-based servers for the world market.At CES 2026, Scott Tease, the Vice President and General Manager of Lenovo's Infrastructure Solutions Group, explained that the firm would set up the AI server systems' design in its Bengaluru development lab and the production of its Pondicherry plant for export and local markets. Lenovo India is one of the companies approved to receive a part of the 17,000-crore IT hardware production-linked incentive scheme.Tease stated, "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. 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...our initial focus in India is India for India, but given geographic proximity, the quality of the workforce, the fact that we've already had such great success building phones and PCs in India, 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".Tease pointed out the advantages of a dual AI system for Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and added that investing heavily in AI infrastructure is not a must always. After the model is ready, its running, or inferring, needs very light hardware, which can be sometimes as small as a laptop or an edge device, thus making AI adoption cheap and easy.Moreover, he stressed that natural language like English would probably be the universal language for coding AI, thereby opening the gates wider for users. On the subject of regulation, Tease hailed the Indian government's plan to "Sovereign AI" for the development of local computing power as a good regulation strategy."The domestic consumption in India is so large that even if you just tackle that alone, we're going to see massive, massive growth there. I visited several GPU-as-a-service and hosted sites that are doing AI, both for local India and for international cloud providers as well. You've got people that are really interested in building out sovereign capabilities in the country. You've got a very AI-friendly, AI-centric government, and that's going to be a big, big help for that kind of growth in the future", he noted.Speaking about the power issue, the speaker mentioned that Lenovo is implementing liquid cooling techniques (Lenovo Neptune) that would save energy by 40% and recycle the heat produced as a source. He further predicted that by the year 2030, countries with workforce readiness instead of those with access to silicon or energy would be the AI era leaders."It is access to talent, for sure... never before have we seen the possibility for countries or workforces to catch up to more mature workforces, as we see right now with AI... the winners are going to be those regions, those companies, those governments that help their people embrace AI as part of what they do", Tease added. IMRTOP STORIES· Lenovo plans to design AI servers in Bengaluru and manufacture them in Pondicherry· Heavy AI model building can be outsourced to cloud or GPU-as-a-service providers· Lenovo promotes liquid cooling to cut energy use, supports India's Sovereign AI initiative
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