Larsen & Toubro (L&T) aims to nearly double its order book to ₹15 lakh crore by 2031, driven by expansion in energy, electrolysers, semiconductors, data centres and manufacturing, President and Whole-time Director (Finance) R Shankar Raman said on Wednesday.

The engineering and construction conglomerate is also focusing on renewables, hydrogen, automation and strengthening its services business to drive long-term growth.

“Manufacturing thrust, consolidation and automating construction infrastructure, making the new areas of renewable and hydrogen work and pushing the services business forward, all of these together, will make the company far far stronger from what it is today by 2031,” Mr. Raman told journalists.

“Since order book is a good indicator, if we grow at 15% year on year till 2031 we will have an order book of ₹15 lakh crore from sub ₹8 lakh crore currently,” he said.

L&T also expects its international business to outpace domestic operations. While India accounted for 75% of revenue a few years ago, the split between India and the Middle East is now 50:50.

Assuming domestic business sustains its current growth trajectory, India and the Middle East could each contribute 40% of revenue by 2031, with new geographies accounting for the remaining 20%. These markets include Europe, Central Asia and the Far East.

“So far we have grown in the west [of India], the east could open up. India will not get to the 75% level what it used to be even though it is a growth market,” Mr. Raman said.

Saudi Arabia is currently L&T’s largest overseas market, followed by the UAE and Qatar. Despite the regional conflict, almost all its sites are operating normally.

Larsen & Toubro (L&T) is expanding its artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure footprint in Chennai, with its digital infrastructure business, Vyoma.AI, breaking ground on a 52 MW data centre as part of a planned gigawatt-scale AI Factory campus.

The groundbreaking ceremony was held on October 28. The facility will expand the existing 30 MW data centre at the company’s Kancheepuram campus, which houses advanced AI compute clusters and has 150 MVA of power infrastructure readiness, L&T said.

The expansion follows L&T’s August announcement that LTN Compute, its AI infrastructure subsidiary under Vyoma.AI, had secured a mega order to build an AI Factory for US-based AI cloud company Together AI. The project involves deploying 10,000 NVIDIA B300 GPUs at the Chennai campus for AI training, inference and fine-tuning workloads. L&T classifies mega orders as contracts valued between ₹10,000 crore and ₹15,000 crore.

In February, L&T also announced a proposed venture with NVIDIA under the IndiaAI Mission to develop gigawatt-scale AI Factory infrastructure, enabling AI models and workloads to be developed and deployed within India.

The new facility will feature direct-to-chip liquid cooling to manage heat from high-density computing, alongside renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies.

“The groundbreaking of our 52 MW Chennai data center marks a significant step in strengthening India’s digital infrastructure ecosystem. As AI adoption accelerates, the data center is being designed to deliver the performance, scalability and resilience required for next-generation workloads while advancing sustainable, low-carbon digital infrastructure,” said Prashant Chiranjive Jain, Managing Director of Vyoma.AI.

Vyoma.AI aims to build more than 250 MW of data centre capacity across India, offering sovereign cloud platforms, GPU-as-a-Service, hyperscale colocation and mission-critical digital infrastructure.

L&T Technology Services (LTTS) is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) for manufacturing and operations to offset pricing pressure from AI-led efficiencies in parts of its engineering business, as it seeks to monetise the technology through proprietary tools, licences and new industrial applications, chief executive Amit Chadha said on Monday.

Speaking at the launch of the company’s Engineering Intelligence (EI) Lab for Manufacturing and Operations in Bengaluru, Mr. Chadha said AI was reducing the effort required for engineering tasks while opening up new business opportunities in products and manufacturing.

“The third part of the business is AI for manufacturing and operations, which is what this lab is about. And this, again, is a net new for us,” he said, outlining LTTS’s three areas of AI activity: engineering, products, and manufacturing and operations.

Pricing pressure is more pronounced in IT and AI-assisted product development, where automation reduces the effort required to complete tasks. LTTS is seeking to offset this through growth in AI-enabled products and manufacturing applications, he said.

The engineering research and development (ER&D) company is already pursuing manufacturing AI projects with clients in pockets of the U.S. and with two European clients. Built on Siemens and NVIDIA technologies, the new Bengaluru lab will serve as an experience centre where customers can explore applications such as digital twins, factory simulations and improvements in material movement across production lines.

LTTS plans to extend its work beyond discrete manufacturing to process industries, including pharmaceuticals. It is also exploring the use of drones and autonomous mobile robots in manufacturing facilities, warehouses, distribution and supply chains. The company plans to set up another manufacturing-focused lab in the U.S. before the end of the current financial year.

Monetising AI

Mr. Chadha said AI was reducing the effort involved in generating code, models, diagrams, mechanical drawings and Mr. components. LTTS is developing proprietary tools and working with technology partners to help clients complete such tasks faster.

“Does effort go down? Yes, effort goes down,” he said.

LTTS is already generating revenue from proprietary tools and licences, which account for 1% of its revenue, he said.

The company is also developing AI-enabled products that process inputs such as visual images, heat and sound at the edge. Pricing for physical AI work is “definitely different and better”, he said, without disclosing comparative pricing, margins or the expected revenue contribution from manufacturing AI.

Mr. Chadha said LTTS’s six strategic bets accounted for about 50% of its revenue at the end of the previous financial year. The company expects these areas to contribute about 80% of revenue over the next five years.

The six strategic bets are Software-Defined Mobility; Plant Buildout and Modernisation; Energy and Industrial Automation and Digital Manufacturing; Next-Generation Compute and AI Infrastructure; Software Platforms and Engineering Intelligence; and MedTech.

LTTS did not disclose the investment in the Bengaluru lab or quantify the productivity gains and reductions in factory downtime customers could achieve through the solutions demonstrated there.

The company spends about 2% of its revenue on research and development-related activities, including laboratories, employee training and engineering assets, Mr. Chadha said.