NxtGen Cloud to Hire 400 AI Engineers to Meet Growing Demand for AI Services

NxtGen Cloud Technologies, a leading data centre and cloud services provider, on Tuesday announced its plans to hire 400 AI engineers in the coming months. The recruitment drive will focus on fresh graduates and aims to support the rising demand for AI services from both businesses and government initiatives like the IndiaAI mission.

The company has already started campus recruitment efforts, with recent visits to MIT-WPU in Pune. It expects to onboard the new hires by the end of this financial year. This expansion will nearly double NxtGen’s workforce, which currently stands at over 400 employees, including 80 AI engineers.

“Our business model of fair pricing has set a global benchmark in pricing for GPU as a service,” A S Rajgopal, managing director and CEO of NxtGen Cloud Technologies, told AIM in an exclusive interaction. “This created the opportunity for NxtGen to go after international markets, coupled with a strong services offering.”

Rajgopal explained that while there is a lot of demand from independent software developers to create AI use-cases, businesses are focused on how AI can increase their revenue or improve productivity. 

“GPUs have no meaning for a business enterprise; they want AI to work for them to create more revenue opportunities or improve productivity. This requires us to make a structured services approach to create such use-cases for our customers,” he said.

As part of its hiring strategy, NxtGen is looking for graduates with knowledge of open-source software, machine learning, deep learning, and an understanding of GenAI architecture, including agentic and RAG workflows.

Fresh hires will undergo a 3-4 month structured training programme with hands-on experience in building AI use-cases. These include data preparation, model fine-tuning, deployment, security, and management of AI solutions for customers.

“We are focused on making AI work for our customers,” Rajgopal said. “Our bespoke service offerings convert customer ideas into commercially viable deployments. The big market opportunity is to run inference-as-a-service. Almost every enterprise, irrespective of size, will use AI.”

NxtGen has already built AI use-cases for its customers and hosted public models. These experiences have been developed into a structured services portfolio aimed at addressing business needs.

Speaking about IndiaAI, Rajgopal added, “IndiaAI is a great initiative by the Government of India. There is no parallel initiative across the world. The IndiaAI mission will create awareness, make Indian foundation models, and create a large pool of skilled manpower.”

NxtGen is providing GPU infrastructure for the IndiaAI mission. “We pushed to optimise operations cost to create globally benchmark pricing,” Rajgopal said. “We believe all the capacity we are creating will be consumed by the initiative. Over the next couple of years, this capacity will be consumed by the enterprise market for inferencing use-cases. For IndiaAI, we focused only on the advanced GPUs that will make an impact on the initiatives.”

According to Rajgopal, the first cohort of 67 IndiaAI applicants alone will require over 18,000 GPUs, highlighting the urgent need for robust AI infrastructure in India. NxtGen aims to lead this space with its GPU-plus-services strategy.

NxtGen Cloud Technologies is also known for serving clients like the Election Commission of India.