India’s rapidly expanding data centre sector is generating employment demand well beyond traditional technology roles, with data centre-related postings rising to 1.3% of all job postings on Indeed in August 2026, up from 1% a year earlier and nearly double the share recorded two years ago.
The finding is from a fresh report by Indeed Hiring Lab, the economic research arm of Indeed, which attributes the trend to the wave of investment in physical infrastructure needed to support AI adoption. KPMG has estimated that data centres represent a $90 billion opportunity for India by 2035.
“The expansion of India’s data centre capacity is creating a new layer of employment demand as businesses invest in the infrastructure required to support AI and other digital services. Importantly, this is not simply a story about more technology jobs. Data centres are complex, large-scale operations that require workers across engineering, project management, business operations and other functions. As investment matures, this broader employment impact is likely to become increasingly visible in the labour market,” Callam Pickering, Senior Economist, APAC at Indeed, said in the report.
The composition of hiring underlines the point. In FY26, software development accounted for 28% of data centre postings, followed by IT infrastructure, operations and support at 15.6% and IT systems and solutions at 7.1%, according to Indeed data. Almost half of the roles fell outside core technology categories, with management at 9.9% of postings, industrial engineering at 5.8%, sales at 5.2%, electrical engineering at 3.6% and project management at 3.5%.
Broader hiring on Indeed has held up. Indian job postings rose 0.2% month on month in August 2026 and were 7.4% higher year on year. Postings remained 85% above pre-pandemic levels, a stronger position than Indeed reports for most other markets. Non-tech occupations are also seeing double-digit growth, with childcare postings up 27%, nursing 23%, pharmacy 20%, physicians and surgeons 17%, dental roles 16% and medical technicians 14%.
Indeed has flagged that its data primarily captures formal-sector recruitment and skews toward technology, management and sales roles, and is therefore not fully representative of India’s overall labour market, where informal employment remains large.
