Bharti Airtel advocates for a national cloud architecture that ensures sovereign control over critical data types, signalling a significant shift in India’s data governance strategy amid rising data consumption and infrastructure investments.
Bharti Airtel has urged India to move beyond a piecemeal approach to data rules and to focus instead on sovereign control of sensitive information through a domestic cloud architecture. Speaking at Global Fintech Fest 2026, Rahul Vatts, the group chief risk officer and director for corporate affairs, said it was wrong to treat local data residency as the same thing as data sovereignty. His argument was that the real issue is who controls the technology stack that processes the data, not simply where the servers are located.
Vatts said the government’s first circular on the issue was a significant step and noted that there have been detailed discussions in recent weeks over how policy should evolve. He argued that India should first define where the control plane sits and how it is administered, then apply the same standard across all critical datasets rather than limiting the discussion to a narrow set of government records.
He said the current framework should be widened to cover areas such as energy data, health records and personal identity information. In his view, these are all sensitive enough to merit the same level of protection, especially as more sectoral regulators issue their own cloud guidance. Vatts said the question for critical workloads is no longer simply which cloud to use, but which architecture can guarantee end-to-end control under Indian law.
Airtel’s comments fit a broader strategic push into data infrastructure. Business Standard reported earlier this year that the group plans to invest ₹39,000 crore across India and Africa and expand data centre capacity beyond 1GW. The company has also launched Airtel Cloud through its Xtelify arm, positioning it as a sovereign, telecom-grade platform designed to keep data within India, and it has partnered with Zscaler on an AI and cyber threat research centre focused on national cyber resilience. Vatts also said Airtel is building a couple of 100MW data centres over the next few years, as India’s data use rises sharply, with monthly consumption per customer already at around 38-40 GB and projected to increase to 70-75 GB within three to four years.
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