India Now Runs More Than 2,100 Capability Centres. Nasscom and Zinnov Say the Next Race Is About Value, Not Volume.

‍A commentary analysis of the Nasscom-Zinnov GCC Landscape Report 2026, "The GCC Value Orbit," and what it signals about the next chapter of India's capability-centre story.

Key Takeaways

• India now hosts 2,117 GCCs across 3,728 units, generating USD 98.4 billion in revenue and employing 2.36 million people in FY2026.
• More than 500 new GCCs and over 1,000 units were set up in the past five years, and India continues to add over 100 new GCCs a year.
• India holds around 28% of the global GCC talent pool and is the second-largest employer of enterprise AI talent in the world after the United States.
• Bengaluru and Hyderabad together attract two-thirds of all new GCCs, with Bengaluru alone home to over 1,080 units and 34% of installed talent.
• The report tracks a shift from cost to value: only 13% of India's GCCs still run on cost arbitrage alone, while 39% now own end-to-end work and domain expertise.

What the Nasscom-Zinnov GCC Landscape Report Tracks

Nasscom, India's national association for the technology industry, and Zinnov, a management consulting and research firm, jointly publish an annual study of India's global capability centre sector. A global capability centre, or GCC, is the in-house office a multinational sets up in India to run its own core work, from engineering to finance to research, rather than outsourcing it. The 2026 edition, subtitled "The GCC Value Orbit: From Delivery Engine to Enterprise Nerve Centre," was released in May and reads the state of the sector in FY2026 while mapping where it is heading. Its central argument is that India's GCC story is moving past growth in numbers toward growth in value.

The Base Has Quietly Reached a Scale That Is Hard to Ignore

The headline figures describe a sector that has crossed from emerging to established. India now hosts 2,117 GCCs operating across 3,728 units, generating USD 98.4 billion in revenue and employing 2.36 million people. Over the past five years the country added more than 500 new GCCs and over 1,000 new units, and it continues to add over 100 GCCs each year. Among the world's 2,000 largest listed companies, 506 now run a GCC in India, up from 423 five years ago.

Revenue has grown at roughly 9.9% a year over the past five years and talent at about 6.2%. What stands out is not just the size but the ownership pattern, with the Americas accounting for 63% of GCCs by headquarters region, followed by EMEA at 28% and Asia Pacific at 9%. India has become the default location for global firms that want to run serious work close to a deep pool of talent.

The Question Has Changed From How Many to How Valuable

The most important shift in the report is not in the counts but in what these centres actually do. For years the story was about scale. Now it is about the kind of work moving to India, and the answer is increasingly high-value work.

Where India's GCCs sit on the value curve (FY2026)

Source: Nasscom-Zinnov GCC Landscape Report 2026

Only 13% of India's GCCs still operate purely on the old cost-saving logic. Nearly four in ten now own their work end to end, with genuine domain expertise, and a small but growing 5% are running AI-native business leadership from India. The report notes that 46% of GCCs now operate at portfolio or transformation-hub maturity, up from 42% five years ago, and that new centres are reaching that advanced stage within five years rather than the ten it historically took. A further sign of seniority is that 64% of India site leaders now hold a dual mandate, meaning they own global responsibilities alongside local ones.

India Is Now Building AI, Not Simply Running It

If there is a single theme running through the 2026 report, it is artificial intelligence, and India's role in it. More than 1,200 India GCCs now have AI and machine-learning capabilities, supported by over 250 dedicated AI centres of excellence and more than 250,000 AI professionals. That talent base represents around 28% of the global GCC pool of AI talent, second only to the United States, and India ranks first among all GCC markets for AI hiring intensity.

The framing here matters. India is not positioned in the report as a place that merely deploys AI built elsewhere. It anchors the application and engineering layers of the global AI stack, with early movement into deeper model research. The frontier the report identifies, where India still trails, is in AI infrastructure and energy rather than in talent or application work. For a country often described as a services back-office, being the world's second-largest concentration of enterprise AI talent is a meaningful reframing.

Two Cities Still Win the Race, but the Map Is Widening

Geographically, the sector remains concentrated, but the edges are spreading. Two-thirds of all new GCCs choose Bengaluru or Hyderabad, and Bengaluru alone accounts for over 1,080 units and 34% of the country's installed GCC talent.

GCC units across leading cities (FY2026)

Source: Nasscom-Zinnov GCC Landscape Report 2026

Underneath the established hubs, a set of emerging cities is beginning to register, with Coimbatore, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Vadodara, and Kochi each now hosting 35 or more GCC units. The report notes that around 5% of GCC units set up over the past year were in these emerging cities, a small share but a real signal that the sector's footprint is starting to broaden beyond the six large markets.

The Workforce and Workplace Are Being Redrawn Together

The report treats talent and physical space as a single design problem, which is a notable shift. On talent, it flags that the half-life of a technical skill has collapsed from around ten years to between two and five, that 60% of workers will need reskilling by 2030, and that 73% of HR leaders believe AI disruption is outpacing workforce readiness. Redeployment is quietly replacing recruitment as the default response.

On space, the report projects that GCC real estate will expand from 263 million sq ft to around 350 million sq ft over the coming years, with 85% of GCCs targeting carbon neutrality by 2030. It reads talent and workplace as a single design problem, with the growth in floor space paired with firm sustainability commitments, and it also frames a broader shift it describes as value coming from what a GCC orchestrates across partners rather than only what it owns, pointing to deep collaboration with universities, skilling platforms, and startups.

From Delivery Engine to Nerve Centre

The report's own subtitle captures its argument: a delivery engine executes what it is told, while a nerve centre senses, decides, and directs. Across the study, in the maturity curve, the AI talent depth, the dual-mandate leaders, and the widening city map, the report makes the case that India's GCCs are moving from the first role toward the second. It frames this as a shift from measuring India's contribution by the volume of work it absorbs to measuring it by the value and decision-making that now sit here. Whether that shift holds at the pace the report suggests will be the thing to watch in future editions, but the direction it documents for FY2026 is consistent across every metric it tracks.

All statistics in this piece originate from the Nasscom-Zinnov GCC Landscape Report 2026, "The GCC Value Orbit" (May 2026). Nasscom and Zinnov produced the research; we have summarised and interpreted it. The full report can be downloaded from Zinnov.