Enterprises keep saying they'll diversify away from India once costs rise. They keep building here anyway.
Global companies have had a decade of reasons to reconsider India: rising wage inflation in the metros, competition from Eastern Europe and Latin America for nearshoring, and periodic predictions that GCCs in India would plateau. None of it has slowed the build-out. India's GCC count has kept climbing past 3,720 units, making it the largest GCC market in the world by a wide margin, and GCC-driven office leasing has grown from roughly 30% of gross leasing volume in 2022 to around 40% in 2025 (CBRE Report). The reasons companies keep building here have shifted from a cost argument to a capability argument, which is also why the workspace planning decisions behind each new centre look different than they did five years ago.
Why Are Global Companies Still Choosing India for GCCs?
The talent pool remains the starting reason, but it is no longer the whole reason. India produces the scale of technical and functional talent that lets a GCC own genuine product and R&D mandates, not just execution work, and roughly 60% of Fortune 500 companies now have a GCC here to draw on exactly that (CBRE Report). What has changed is what enterprises expect a centre to deliver once that talent is in place: platform ownership, AI initiatives, and global product responsibility that used to sit only at headquarters.
This shift is why GCCs in India increasingly show up in strategy conversations rather than cost-reduction conversations. A centre asked to own a product roadmap needs a different kind of workspace, more collaboration-dense, more compliance-ready, than a centre built purely for back-office throughput, and companies keep expanding here because the ecosystem, providers, talent, infrastructure, has kept pace with that shift.
What Is Driving Continued GCC Expansion India Right Now?
GCC expansion India is increasingly demand-led rather than opportunistic. GCCs accounted for roughly 40% of gross office leasing across India in 2025, up from about 30% in 2022, and more than two-thirds of that 2025 demand originated from US-headquartered companies (CBRE Report). That is not the leasing pattern of companies testing a market; it is the pattern of companies expanding centres they have already committed capital and mandates to.
The practical effect is that expansion decisions are being made earlier and at larger scale than before. Enterprises are less likely to lease a small pilot floor and reassess in 18 months, and more likely to commit to a larger footprint upfront because the mandate justifying the centre is already defined before the lease is signed.
How Has the Nature of GCCs in India Changed Over the Past Decade?
A decade ago, most GCCs in India ran transactional, execution-heavy work: IT support, back-office processing, standardised finance and HR operations. That category still exists, but it is no longer where growth is concentrated. The centres driving today's expansion numbers own product decisions, R&D charters, and increasingly AI strategy for entire business lines, work that used to be considered too sensitive or too strategic to run outside headquarters.
This changes the profile of the workspace a GCC needs. A transactional centre can run on a standardised floor plate. A centre owning a product roadmap needs space built around cross-functional collaboration, a stronger compliance and security posture, and enough flexibility to scale as the mandate grows, which is a materially different design brief than the one most India GCCs were built to five years ago.
Where Is GCC Expansion India Happening Beyond the Metros?
Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai remain the largest GCC corridors, but expansion is no longer confined to them. Business-friendly state policies and improving urban infrastructure are turning a wider set of cities into credible options for a company's second or third India centre, not just an overflow choice when metro capacity runs out.
This changes how enterprises approach workspace planning for an expansion. A city that made sense for a first, execution-focused centre does not automatically make sense for a second centre built around a different, more strategic mandate, which means each new India location increasingly gets evaluated on its own merits rather than assumed to follow the first.
Why Does Workspace Planning Matter More for GCCs Than for Other Enterprises?
GCCs run larger floor plates, more variable attendance patterns across time zones, and higher compliance requirements than a typical single-market office, which raises the cost of getting workspace planning wrong. A floor plate sized on today's headcount, without accounting for the mandate a centre is likely to grow into within 18-24 months, tends to force a renegotiation the enterprise did not budget for.
This is where technology-enabled workspace planning is starting to change the calculus. Speaking to The Economic Times about how AI, data, and connected technologies are reshaping enterprise workplace strategy, Table Space's Chief Information Technology Officer, Ashwin Chandrasekar, made the point that the real opportunity with AI in this context isn't speed, it's better decisions, achieved by connecting every stage of the workspace lifecycle, from site selection through to employee experience, rather than treating technology as something added after a space is already built. Table Space's own AI Market Intelligence Platform, which scores potential locations across 20 cities and 126 office corridors before a design brief is written, and its Automated Design Engine, which models layout and capex before construction, are examples of this planning-before-building approach applied at portfolio scale.
"The real opportunity with AI in workplace planning isn't speed, it's better decisions. For a GCC especially, that means connecting every stage of the lifecycle, site selection, design, delivery, employee experience, into one continuous view instead of treating each stage as a separate handoff." — Ashwin Chandrasekar, Chief Information Technology Officer, Table Space.His full interview is covered in the Economic Times feature on workplaces evolving into connected environments.
What Should Enterprises Prioritise When Planning a GCC in India?
Enterprises evaluating a new or expanded GCC in India should treat location, infrastructure, technology, and compliance as a single workspace planning decision rather than a sequence of separate approvals. A location choice made before infrastructure and technology requirements are clear can eliminate the buildings that would otherwise have been the right fit, and a workspace sized for today's headcount alone tends to be the wrong size within two years.
Table Space's own portfolio reflects how large this segment has become in practice: of its 431 unique clients across 11.46 million sq ft of leasable area, 115 are GCCs, accounting for 53.50% of leased area, and its mature facilities run at 92.64% occupancy, the highest among benchmarked operators (CBRE Report, cited in the company's August 2026 DRHP).
Global companies aren't building GCCs in India despite the cost pressures; they're building them because the capability case has become stronger than the cost case ever was. Planning your next GCC's workspace in India? Talk to the Table Space team.
