Bloomberg Television Sep 20, 2026
With Shirish Godbole, CEO of Knowledge Realty Trust · Jon Gray, Chief Operating Officer at Blackstone · Deepa Mani, Professor of Information Systems at the Indian School of Business · Krishna Ella, Chairman of Bharat Biotech · Nitesh Agarwal, Chief Strategy Officer at Tech Mahindra
Hyderabad holds about 160 million square feet of office space. A decade ago it held roughly 50 million.
Bangalore is still the larger market, approaching 300 million square feet, and it is the city that gets called India's Silicon Valley. What the people building Hyderabad described is a market that has roughly tripled in ten years and was assembled on purpose, with the engineering schools built before the multinationals arrived.
Bangalore is a bigger market. It's approaching 300 million square feet. Hyderabad is much smaller. It's like 160 million square feet. So, much smaller. But a decade ago, Hyderabad was probably 50.
Shirish Godbole, CEO of Knowledge Realty Trust, on Bloomberg Television, runs India's largest office REIT. He gave the interview at Sattva Knowledge City, the Blackstone-financed campus he calls the crown jewel of the portfolio, where 75,000 people work for tenants including Apple, JPMorgan and Microsoft.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 8 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
Hyderabad's office stock went from about 50M sq ft to about 160M in ten years, against Bangalore's 300M
One campus, Sattva Knowledge City, holds 75,000 workers
The tenants are global capability centers — foreign companies' own divisions, not outsourcing vendors
Blackstone spent extra on parks, water and shops rather than building as cheaply as possible
India's REIT market was lobbied into existence, and Blackstone has sponsored 5 of the 6 REITs that exist
Hyderabad's talent pool was a policy decision, not an accident: the state built IIIT and the ISB first
Bharat Biotech's chairman says India's vaccine industry is entirely family-owned, with zero government investment
His stated benefit from the local government is that it does not interfere
Infosys and Wipro have cut headcount 5 to 6% from 2023 levels, on an S&P report the program cited
Demand for global capability centers has gone up because of AI, not down, Godbole said
1. 160M Sq Ft And Climbing
The segment opened on Hyderabad as the rival racing to catch Bengaluru, a city the program described as dominant in life sciences and now host to Amazon, Meta and Apple. Godbole gave the two markets' sizes and the rate of change.
Hyderabad has roughly tripled its office stock in ten years
Bangalore is a bigger market. It's approaching 300 million square feet. Hyderabad is much smaller. It's like 160 million square feet. So, much smaller. But a decade ago, Hyderabad was probably 50.
Shirish Godbole
The interview was filmed at Sattva Knowledge City, one of the developments Blackstone financed, with Apple, JPMorgan and Microsoft among the tenants.
One campus holds 75,000 workers
It's the crown jewel of the Knowledge Realty Trust portfolio. It's got 75,000 people working in all the buildings in and out.
Shirish Godbole
2. What A GCC Actually Is
Asked who the tenants are and what all those people do, Godbole gave the plain definition of the thing the whole market is built on.
A global capability center is a foreign company's own division, not a vendor it hired
So a lot of them are what we call global capability centers. So these are basically offices, divisions, if you want to call it, of foreign companies mainly. And they are providing technological support in a variety of ways for their worldwide employees, enterprises.
Shirish Godbole
3. Parks, Not Cheap Boxes
Jon Gray described the decision Blackstone made when it started developing in India, which was to stop building to the lowest cost.
The firm built an environment rather than the cheapest possible building
I think part of what we did coming to India on the real estate side was rather than the old model, build it as inexpensively as possible. Let's create a great environment where you can bicycle around and you've got a bunch of little shops you can go to and there are actually parks, and water, and it feels great to be there.
Jon Gray
The extra spend shows up in how the tenants and their staff feel about the place
And you make that incremental investment and the tenants and the people working there feel much better. And it's part of this overall improvement of India as a country.
Jon Gray
4. How India Got Its REITs
The program put it to Gray that India has something like six REITs and that Blackstone has been the sponsor and the center of five of them, then asked how the structure came about. Gray's answer is that his firm lobbied for the legislation.
The pitch went to the prime minister and the finance minister
Steve Schwarzman talked to the Prime Minister at one point. We talked to the Finance Minister and different people in the government.
Jon Gray
The argument was that a REIT market lowers the cost of capital
And we said, "Look, if you look at all the countries around the world with major markets, to get more capital into their real estate markets, if you could create a real estate market, a REIT market, you could get more capital flowing that will drive down the cost of capital. You'll get more development."
Jon Gray
Delhi studied it for years and then legislated
And the government studied it for a number of years, looked at it, had a whole process. And ultimately came up with REIT legislation.
Jon Gray
Blackstone then used the structure to take its own companies public, which lets those companies raise capital and grow faster, and gives public shareholders exposure to them.
The constraint that is lifting is access to capital
But to me, it's another evolution of a country that before was really constrained with access to capital. And as India changes the rules and makes it more and more growth friendly, which they've done, I think, really effectively, you'll see investors like us and now public market investors deploying more capital there. And it will accelerate this growth.
Jon Gray
5. Talent Was A Policy Choice
Hyderabad sits a short drive from the Indian School of Business, which the program called one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. Deepa Mani teaches information systems there, and her account of how the city got its engineers is that the state built them before the demand arrived.
The tech ecosystem came out of deliberate government decisions
So if you look at the development of the tech ecosystem in Hyderabad, it was an outcome of very careful policy decisions by the government.
Deepa Mani
The institutions she named are IIIT and the ISB itself, both set up by the chief minister of the day, Chandrababu Naidu.
The point was capacity for the multinationals and for domestic demand at the same time
So this was cluster development, which he engaged in, to build the capacity that was needed of not just the MNCs that were coming in and the global capital centers that were coming in, but also growing domestic demand for technology talent.
Deepa Mani
Asked how Hyderabad hopes to avoid the problems Bengaluru ran into, Mani named two lessons. Bangalore got the Indian Institute of Science, she said, but not as a conscious policy intervention.
The first lesson was to build the people before the demand
I think there were two things that Hyderabad learned. One was about human capacity development, right?
Deepa Mani
The second was to make the sector cheaper to enter
The second was to reduce barriers of entry in the sector.
Deepa Mani
6. Genome Valley From Nothing
Hyderabad is also the center of India's pharmaceuticals industry. Krishna Ella is chairman of Bharat Biotech, which the program identified as India's second largest vaccine manufacturer, based on the outskirts of the city in the cluster known as Genome Valley. He described what was there when he came back.
There was no road and no electricity on the site in 1996
I think there was no Genome Valley when I came to India, 96, 97, I came back to India. There was no road, nothing in this place, literally nothing. No electricity also.
Krishna Ella
His stated purpose is to stop India copying
I'm a strong believer, India should not be copying anymore. India should innovate. For that, you need to create an ecosystem. So Genome Valley is becoming a brand for that, to create that ecosystem.
Krishna Ella
Asked what made India a force in vaccines specifically, Ella gave an ownership answer rather than a scientific one.
Every vaccine maker in India is privately and family owned
I think it's only entrepreneurs. See, you look at all the vaccine industries, all privately owned and family owned companies. It is not private equity or somebody controlling the company. It is all private owned. No government involvement, zero role with the government investment and all private owner. So the private owner means we can take a lot of risk and we can take a minimum profit and move on.
Krishna Ella
On how much Genome Valley matters to Hyderabad, he widened the answer to the country and credited the state government twice — once for being proactive, once for staying out of the way.
The best thing the government does is not interfere
See, for us, if they don't interfere itself is the greatest benefit and they're more proactive.
Krishna Ella
He calls it the largest cluster in India and a template for other states
And this is the largest cluster in the country itself. And this is a role model to the other states to follow.
Krishna Ella
7. The AI Risk To Back Office
The program set out the challenge directly: much of Hyderabad's tech employment is back office, call center and IT support work, which is the work most exposed to AI. It cited a report from S&P finding that Infosys and Wipro had cut staffing by around 5 to 6 percent from 2023 levels, with similar trends at other firms.
Gray accepted the premise and then argued the bear case stops too early.
Some of the white-collar services work does get replaced
So I think it's both a challenge and an opportunity. I think the challenge lies in the fact that India has had great strength in IT services and providing a lot of functions, white collar services at very attractive costs. Some of that will get replaced by AI.
Jon Gray
His evidence is a company Blackstone owns a large stake in.
Mphasis has already turned itself into an AI deployment business
We own a large stake in a business called Mphasis, an IT services company, and they have pivoted their business to focus on AI deployment because changing companies utilizing AI is also going to require an enormous amount of manpower.
Jon Gray
What the India bears also underestimate, he said, is how willing people in India are to use the technology, and what that produces in new companies and new AI infrastructure.
8. Demand Went Up, Not Down
Nitesh Agarwal, chief strategy officer at Tech Mahindra, took the same question as a training problem. The generation now arriving will grow up in an AI-native world; everyone already working has to retrain, himself included.
The constraint is curiosity, not technology
And the way I look at it is I think AI requires a lot of reskilling, right?
Nitesh Agarwal
India's advantage is that its talent at scale is willing to retrain
And there is where I would say I would want to believe that India actually stands a very good chance, because it has talent, it has talent at scale, but it has talent which is actually learning ready. And so they don't mind pivoting.
Nitesh Agarwal
He added the qualification himself: not every individual will pivot, but as long as the culture is there, people acclimatize to an AI-first way of working.
The program put the stakes in numbers — IT services employs about 6 million people in India and contributes about 7 percent of GDP — and then gave the last word to the landlord, who is the one taking the leasing risk on all of it.
Ten years out is unpredictable; today the demand is robust
AI is moving so fast so that in 10 years, it's hard to really predict. But today, you'd be surprised, really, that in fact, we've had robust demand and the demand seems very, very much there, at least for the foreseeable future.
Shirish Godbole
The work moved from call center to front office, which is why the demand rose
If I look back two decades ago, we were like a call center. That call center has gone to a back office. The back office went to a mid-office and the mid office now is literally a front office because tech is really part of the business, right? And that's why I feel despite AI, we're doing very well.
Shirish Godbole
Bonus Insights
The word the segment was built around
The program opened on "bhavishyatu," which it translated as the Telugu word for future, and used it as the frame for a city trying to catch its rival. Hyderabad is known to some in India as Genome Valley because of its position in life sciences.
Hyderabad's tenant list is a who's who of US technology
Beyond the Sattva Knowledge City tenants, the program named Amazon, Meta and Apple among the multinationals that have taken space in the city.
Bangalore's institute was an accident; Hyderabad's were not
Mani's contrast between the two cities was institutional rather than commercial. The Indian Institute of Science ending up in Bangalore was, in her words, not quite an accident but not a conscious policy intervention either, and that difference is what Hyderabad set out to correct.
Godbole's bottom line is that the office market Hyderabad has built out of policy rather than luck is getting more demand because of AI rather than less, because the work its tenants do has moved from the call center to the front office — and that the landlord's risk is the 10-year view, which he says nobody can predict.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Knowledge Realty Trust (India's largest office REIT, which Godbole runs; Sattva Knowledge City in Hyderabad is what he calls the crown jewel of its portfolio)
Blackstone (Financed Sattva Knowledge City, sponsored 5 of India's 6 REITs, and lobbied the government to create the REIT structure in the first place)
Sattva Knowledge City (The Hyderabad campus where the interview was filmed: 75,000 workers, with Apple, JPMorgan and Microsoft among the tenants)
Indian School of Business and IIIT Hyderabad (The two institutions Mani says the state built deliberately, to create engineering and managerial capacity before the demand arrived)
Bharat Biotech (India's second largest vaccine manufacturer, in Genome Valley on the outskirts of Hyderabad; Ella says the whole vaccine industry is family-owned with zero government investment)
Infosys and Wipro (Cut staffing by around 5 to 6% from 2023 levels, on the S&P report the program cited, with similar trends elsewhere in the sector)
Mphasis (The IT services company Blackstone holds a large stake in; Gray says it has pivoted to AI deployment)
Tech Mahindra (Agarwal's firm, a services and consulting company with offices across India including Hyderabad)
Apple, Microsoft and JPMorgan (Named as tenants of Sattva Knowledge City; Amazon and Meta were named among the multinationals in the city)
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