GCCs: India's quiet $98-billion export engine

In brief: India's global capability centres — the in-house offshore offices of the world's biggest companies — have grown from a cost-arbitrage footnote into a $98.4-billion market employing 2.36 million people, per the latest Nasscom-Zinnov census. Multinationals keep expanding them, states now court them like factories, and smaller cities are getting in the game. The honest version: it is a genuine structural shift, but one with concentration risks, a compliance maze, and an AI question nobody can fully answer yet.

What a GCC actually is

Strip away the jargon and a global capability centre is a simple thing: a multinational's own office in India, doing the company's real work. Not a vendor. Not a contractor. Eli Lilly's scientists in Hyderabad, a US bank's risk modellers in Bengaluru, a retailer's supply-chain planners in Chennai — employees of the parent company, sitting in India, working on the parent company's products.

The lineage is usually traced to Texas Instruments' Bangalore design centre in the mid-1980s — an experiment that proved Indian engineers could do core R&D, not just back-office processing. Four decades later the experiment has a census. The Nasscom-Zinnov report released in September 2024 counted roughly 1,700 GCCs in India generating $64.6 billion in export revenue and employing more than 1.9 million people. Eighty new centres opened in FY24 alone, against 77 in FY23. The newest edition of the same census — "GCC Value Orbit," released at the Nasscom GCC Summit in May 2026 — puts the current count at 2,117 centres across 3,728 units, employing about 2.36 million professionals, with total market revenue of $98.4 billion. That is 32% growth since FY21, and an estimated 506 of the Forbes Global 2000 now run operations from India.

To put that in perspective: the "$50-billion export" shorthand still floating around in conversation is already stale. The sector crossed that line a while ago.

Why multinationals keep expanding them

The original pitch was cost — good engineers at a fraction of Western salaries. That pitch still works, but it is no longer the pitch. Three things changed.

First, the work itself moved up the value chain. More than 1,200 Indian GCCs now have embedded AI and machine learning capabilities, supported by over 250 dedicated Centres of Excellence and a talent base of some 250,000 AI professionals, according to the 2026 Nasscom-Zinnov findings. Nearly half of all GCCs set up since FY21 were built with AI as a core focus from day one. The conversation inside these centres, the report notes, has shifted from what AI can do to how to govern it and make it pay at scale. Nasscom president Rajesh Nambiar has described this as a reset "from scale to value" — GCCs increasingly owning global products, platforms, and business outcomes rather than executing tasks handed down from headquarters.

Second, the maturity curve compressed. Nearly 50% of India's GCCs now operate at what the census calls high maturity — architecting decisions and setting enterprise-wide standards, not just delivering capability. Strikingly, 96% of centres established after FY21 launched with a product or portfolio mandate from the start, and 64% of India site leaders now hold dual mandates combining global functional ownership with local leadership. The old model — prove yourself for a decade, then get real responsibility — has been short-circuited.

Third, the mid-market arrived. The 2025 Nasscom-Zinnov study on mid-market momentum counted over 480 mid-sized GCCs employing more than 210,000 professionals across 680 units — 27% of all GCCs. Over the previous two years, more than 45 new mid-market centres opened, making up 35% of all new GCCs. This matters because it means the model is no longer reserved for Fortune 500 giants with thousand-person appetites; smaller multinationals are setting up leaner, faster-maturing shops.

The announcements keep coming

The census numbers are abstract; the announcements are not. In the last fortnight alone:

US B2B payments company Billtrust opened its Hyderabad centre at Mindspace IT Park in Madhapur — over 40,000 square feet, backed by a ₹450-crore investment commitment over three years and a plan to build a 1,000-member engineering, AI, and operations team. It went from zero to 100 employees in six months. Telangana's IT minister D. Sridhar Babu personally inaugurated it, telling the company's leadership that "Telangana will be a partner in your progress" — states now compete for GCCs the way they once competed for car plants.

Pharma major Eli Lilly announced its second India centre — Lilly Capability Centre India (LCCI) Hyderabad — hiring more than 1,000 people for automation, AI, software product engineering, and cloud, a decade after its first centre in Bengaluru opened in 2016. And US education company Imagine Learning opened a Bengaluru centre on September 23 to build AI, engineering, and product teams for learning products used by more than 18 million students worldwide, with founder-CEO Jonathan Grayer calling Bengaluru "an important part of Imagine Learning's future."

Notice the pattern: these are not IT services firms. They are a payments company, a drugmaker, an education company — all building product and AI capability in India. That is the structural shift in miniature.

What it means for Indian cities and talent

The geography is still lopsided, and worth stating plainly. Bengaluru holds about 29% of India's GCC network; Hyderabad has risen to 14%, up from 12% in FY24. Add NCR, Chennai, Pune, and Mumbai and you have accounted for the large majority. South India alone draws over 60% of GCC office leasing activity.

But the edges are moving. Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Vadodara are emerging as viable hubs on cost and talent; Indore and Bhubaneswar keep appearing in expansion plans. The logic is straightforward: one industry estimate puts India's annual STEM graduate output at 1.5 million, and that talent is not all in Bengaluru. Mid-market GCCs in particular are finding tier-2 cities workable, backed by state governments offering policy support.

The employment math, from staffing firm TeamLease's November 2025 study of the sector, is worth quoting carefully: the GCC ecosystem supports about 10.4 million jobs in total — roughly 2 million direct, 1.8 million allied, and 6.5 million induced roles in housing, transport, food, and services around these campuses. Average GCC salaries run 25 to 30% above the national average. Between FY23 and FY25, India added 220 new GCCs, a 14% increase in two years, and TeamLease projects 2.8 to 4 million additional jobs by FY30, with 14 to 22% of new hires being digital-first freshers skilled in AI, cloud, data engineering, and cybersecurity.

That last number is the one to watch. If it materialises, GCCs become one of India's most important escalators into the formal, high-skill economy — not just for IIT graduates but for trained freshers from everywhere.

The honest caveats

An honest account cannot stop at the brochure. Four caveats:

AI cuts both ways. The same AI mandate driving expansion could flatten headcount growth even as revenue climbs. If AI makes every team materially more productive, the next billion dollars of GCC revenue may need fewer new chairs. The census projects headcount reaching 2.5 to 2.8 million by 2030 — solid growth, but notably slower than revenue growth to $99–105 billion. The industry is, in effect, betting it can sell higher-value work faster than automation eats the lower-value kind. That bet is not yet proven.

Concentration is real. For all the tier-2 talk, this remains a six-city story, and within those cities, a handful of corridors. A downturn in Western corporate technology budgets — the 2023–24 IT slowdown, when the Economic Survey noted hiring "slowed down considerably" — transmits directly into these campuses. GCCs diversify India's services exports, but they do not decouple them from the West.

The compliance maze is getting denser. TeamLease's study counts over 500 unique legal obligations and some 2,000 compliance requirements a year across labour, taxation, data privacy, FDI/FEMA, and environmental law. That is friction, and it is a tax on exactly the mid-market entrants the ecosystem wants to attract.

Cost arbitrage narrows as wages rise. Salaries 25–30% above the national average are good news for workers and a slow leak in the original value proposition. The centres thriving today are the ones selling capability and ownership, not cheap hours — which is precisely why the maturity numbers matter more than the headcount ones.

The quiet part

Here is what is genuinely remarkable: a $98.4-billion export industry employing 2.36 million people built almost no mythology around itself. There are no GCC equivalents of the Infosys or TCS founding legends in popular culture. Nasscom chairperson Sindhu Gangadharan's summary of the FY24 census was about as dramatic as it gets: GCCs, she said, "have rapidly evolved from being operational hubs to becoming true engines of innovation and strategic growth."

She is right, and the numbers since have only strengthened the case. But "quiet" is doing real work in that sentence. These centres do not face Indian consumers, do not advertise, and do not show up in election speeches. Their output ships inside products whose brand names belong to other countries. India gets the jobs, the salaries, the campuses, the induced millions — and almost none of the narrative.

Whether that is a problem or simply a fact depends on what India wants next. If the goal is employment and foreign exchange, the machine is working. If the goal is Indian companies owning global products, the GCC boom is a training ground, not the destination. Either way, it deserves more attention than it gets — which is exactly why the $50-billion shorthand needs retiring. The thing being described has nearly doubled since.