Zoho has unveiled its first-ever locally designed server called Nathu La, marking the enterprise software giant’s foray into the data hardware market amid a growing focus on tech sovereignty in India.
The Nathu La server was designed in-house by Zoho and comprises Intel Xeon 6 processors which were enabled collaboratively with Intel by leveraging their technical expertise, the Chennai-based multinational said in a press release on Tuesday, June 10.
Data centres with Nathu La servers can achieve equivalent performance with a 12-18 per cent lower power consumption and 20-30 per cent lower total cost of ownership (TCO) which, in turn, can also bring down the cost of inference, where an AI model is made to generate outputs on previously unseen data.
With the debut of its Nathu La server, Zoho joins a small group of companiesdesigning their own server hardware, with the underlying intellectual property fully owned in India. It also comes as demand for servers surges alongside cloud computing and AI adoption, increasing the strategic importance of reducing India’s reliance on imported AI infrastructure components.
“With Zoho’s strategy of using contextual, right-sized models, running on our own platform, now on our own servers, accelerated by our own GPU database, we are compounding the benefits accrued from owning and operating our entire technology stack. These long-term R&D investments we are making at every layer of the stack are aimed at delivering customer value and ensuring that our solutions are more sustainable and accessible for businesses than the competition,” Shailesh Davey, CEO of Zoho Corp., said in a statement.
Under the hood
Based on Intel Xeon 6 Processors, Zoho’s Nathu La server is designed to optimise performance for virtualization (VM), High Performance Computing (HPC), AI inference, and storage applications, as per the company.
The server has customized power delivery subsystems, an in-house DC-SCM (Data Centre Secure Control Module) design, and modular chassis options compatible with diverse end-user environments, offering flexibility across deployment types, Zoho said.
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Zoho further emphasised that all modular components of the server, including the DC-SCM and NIC (Network Interface Card), has been designed in-house by the company hardware engineering team and assembled through partnerships with Indian electronics manufacturing services (EMS) firms.
What started as a small R&D team in Nagpur during Covid, asking whether we could design a server entirely from first principles, has grown into a full platform we’re genuinely proud to put our name on. It’s called Nathu La. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/u9pjqWOPf6
— Zoho (@Zoho) June 10, 2026
Zoho also said that it has filed five patents covering topics such as cutting-edge thermal management and cost-optimised server architecture designs. On the design philosophy behind Nathu La, Zoho said the server supports the Open Compute Project (OCP) with a focus on modularity, thermal efficiency, and ease of maintenance.
The company plans on using these servers in its data centres while reducing total cost of ownership and power consumption of these facilities. It will also enable the company to host Zoho applications on the Nathu La server platform optimised for specific workloads and improving performance.
Deploying these servers in its data centres could also help Zoho bring down inference cost for its AI usage. In terms of security, Zoho said that Nathu La servers have been designed with “hardware-rooted security at every layer of the stack.”
Eye on tech sovereignty
Zoho said that it did not depend on any foreign entities while developing the server platform, including for security audits, firmware updates, or licensing continuity. The platform has also been designed in alignment with the Open Source Software (OSS) policy and the highest Local Content Policy (total values that are sourced in India) as well as government initiatives such as Make in India, Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan, and the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
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Zoho said it has been working on the Nathu La server motherboard and chassis platform for the past five years, investing in R&D across hardware, firmware, and systems management.
It was designed by a small team in Nagpur set up in 2020. Members of this team also included new hires from Student’s Engagement for Transformative Upskilling (SETU), the company’s initiative to hire industry-ready engineers straight from colleges across central India.So far, over 300 students have been trained through this programme, some of whom now work at Zoho.
