Blackstone opens its first capability centre outside the US, in Bengaluru

Top image: Prestige Technostar, an office park carrying the Prestige Group's name, on a road in Kundalahalli, east Bengaluru, on December 8, 2019. Blackstone's new centre is in a different park, Prestige Lakeshore Drive, which the firm co-owns with the Prestige Group. Photo by SlowPhoton, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Blackstone, the New York investment firm, announced on Tuesday, October 27, that it had opened a second office in India, DealStreetAsia reported. The new one is in Bengaluru. According to Businessworld, it is the firm's first global capability centre outside the United States.

A global capability centre, or GCC, is an office that a multinational owns and staffs itself, doing work such as accounting, software and compliance for the parent company. India hosts 2,117 of them. They employed 2.36 million people as of March 2026, according to the GCC Value Orbit report from Nasscom and Zinnov. The count is up 32 percent since fiscal 2021.

Blackstone manages close to $1.4 trillion, Businessworld reported. The Nasscom report estimated that 506 companies from the Forbes Global 2000 run operations from India.

"We are proud to deepen our presence in India with a new office in Bengaluru," Michael Chae said. He is Blackstone's vice chairman and chief financial officer. In the firm's announcement, he called the expansion a reaffirmation of its "long-term commitment to India."

Susan Yung will run the centre. She is a senior managing director in investment operations at Blackstone Credit & Insurance. DealStreetAsia reported that she lived in Bengaluru earlier in her career, while working at Goldman Sachs. The office sits in Prestige Lakeshore Drive, a park owned jointly by Blackstone Real Estate and the Prestige Group.

The centre will support finance, technology, human resources, legal and compliance work, Businessworld reported. Its engineering team will work directly with the firm's global chief technology officer. Blackstone had about 80 employees in Bengaluru and 90 in Mumbai, according to the same report. It aims to pass 100 in Bengaluru by year's end.

Mumbai stays the India headquarters for the firm's investment professionals. Neither report said how large the Bengaluru centre would grow after this year.

Blackstone plans to put far more money into India. Businessworld reported that the firm aims to double its investments there to $100 billion over five years. About $51 billion is invested so far. Its holdings include the IT services company Mphasis, Federal Bank and $22 billion of Indian real estate.

The firm calls itself India's largest owner of office, retail and logistics property, according to DealStreetAsia. It says it also helped launch five of India's six listed real estate investment trusts.

On artificial intelligence, Chae said it was too soon to say whether the technology would cause widespread job losses, Businessworld reported. Mphasis was his example. He said the company was using AI to strengthen its business. Businesses, he said, would likely keep relying on outside IT partners for AI.

Nasscom puts AI at the centre of the industry's next phase. "India's GCC ecosystem is undergoing a fundamental reset," Rajesh Nambiar, its president, said in July. More than 1,200 Indian GCCs have built in AI and machine learning, according to the report.

States are courting more of these centres. Uttar Pradesh wants 500 of them by 2031, the news agency UNI reported. The chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, set that goal at a summit in Lucknow on Monday, October 26. UNI counted 15 agreements with GCC companies and talent firms at the summit, plus 13 with academic institutions.

In Washington, a Senate bill could reach offices like this one. Senator Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, wrote the HIRE Act. It sets a 25 percent excise tax on US companies' payments for foreign work that benefits American consumers.

The accounting firm RSM wrote in October 2025 that the bill, as drafted, exempts no payments to a company's own foreign offices. The bill has not moved. Congress's record shows S. 2976 went to the Senate Finance Committee on October 6, 2025. It lists no later action.