Zoho unveils India-designed Nathu La server, deepens push to own AI and cloud infrastructure stack

Zoho Corporation, the parent company of ManageEngine and Zoho, has unveiled Nathu La, an India-designed server platform that marks the company’s latest step towards building and controlling its entire technology stack, from hardware and data centres to software applications and artificial intelligence models.

The server, developed over five years by Zoho’s engineering team in Nagpur, delivers equivalent performance while consuming 12-18% less power and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) by 20-30%, according to the company. Based on Intel Xeon 6 processors, Nathu La was developed in collaboration with Intel and is currently being deployed across Zoho’s own infrastructure.

The launch comes as India’s digital infrastructure expands rapidly, even as much of the underlying server technology continues to be imported from global vendors. Speaking to Business Today, Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director – AI Research at Zoho and ManageEngine says that Nathu La represents a move towards technological sovereignty by enabling the company to own the design, firmware and systems engineering layers of its infrastructure.

While key components, including Intel’s Xeon 6 platform, continue to be imported, Ramamoorthy argues that the strategic value lies in owning the design expertise built around the silicon. The company has developed the server architecture, firmware, systems management software, power delivery subsystems, and workload-specific optimisations in-house.

“The base chip is imported, but there is a lot of deltas to it,” said Ramamoorthy. “The design know-how seems very important. We are just barely scratching the surface, and we are just one private company trying to do it,” he added.

“We are proud to build a server system that is truly designed in India and taking a step towards creating sovereign technology,” said Shailesh Davey, CEO, Zoho Corp. “The development of the Nathu La server reflects our commitment to creating complex technology powered by talent from smaller towns and villages.”

The server motherboard and chassis platform has been designed to optimise workloads such as virtualisation, high-performance computing, AI inference, and storage applications. Zoho said all modular components, including the Data Centre Secure Control Module (DC-SCM) and Network Interface Card (NIC), have been designed in-house and assembled through Indian EMS partners. The company has filed more than five patents covering thermal management and cost-optimised server architecture.

Unlike traditional server manufacturers, Zoho is not positioning Nathu La as a commercial hardware product. The company currently uses the platform internally and has deployed around 1,000 servers across its Indian data centres. With 20 data centres globally, Zoho plans to expand deployment to more workloads over time, though it says global OEM servers will continue to coexist with Nathu La.
“We have built this very purpose-built for our own use cases,” said Ramamoorthy. “We know the use case, we narrow it down, we fine-tune it.”

The server initiative is also closely linked to Zoho’s AI strategy. The company plans to host its applications and AI workloads on Nathu La, allowing tighter integration between hardware, software and data centres while lowering inference costs.

“With AI advancements, inference costs are rising rapidly. With our strategy of using contextual, right-sized models, running on our own platform, on our own servers, in our own data centres, we are compounding the benefits accrued from owning and operating our entire technology stack,” Davey said.
Zoho’s in-house large language model, ZLLM, which the company launched last year is now integrated across its product suite, with the company currently developing 32-billion and 100-billion parameter models. According to Ramamoorthy, more than 85% of customers prefer using Zoho’s bundled AI capabilities instead of connecting to external models.

The Nathu La project was developed from Zoho’s Nagpur facility and supported by SETU (Student’s Engagement for Transformative Upskilling), the company’s skilling programme focused on Electronics System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM). Aligned with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s skill development policy, the initiative has trained over 300 engineering students across Central India, some of whom have contributed to the server’s development.

Looking ahead, Zoho sees potential opportunities beyond internal deployments. Ramamoorthy said a logical next step could be offering servers preloaded with Zoho software to enterprise and government customers, though the company has not established a timeline for such plans.