Vinit Gupta: From Power Infrastructure To Shaping Legrand India’s Data Centre Strategy

For Vinit Gupta, Head – Strategy and Digital Infrastructure at Legrand India, the data centre business is not simply about selling power or cooling equipment. His work sits at the intersection of strategy, infrastructure planning, technology and customer requirements, drawing on a career that has moved across several commercial and technical functions.

Vinit is a computer engineer with a master’s degree in marketing. Earlier in his career, he worked across multinational companies in sales, international sales, product management, pricing and marketing, before taking on leadership responsibilities within Numeric India, a Legrand Group company.

At Numeric India, Vinit served as Country Head – Marketing, where his responsibilities included defining the organisation’s long-term roadmap, product roadmap and branding strategy, while identifying emerging market trends and new business opportunities. That role gave him exposure not only to market development but also to the evolution of power infrastructure and UPS requirements across sectors.

His association with data centre infrastructure also predates his current position. Vinit has participated in industry forums focused on data centres and cloud infrastructure, including Data Center Dynamics events, where themes ranged from energy-smart infrastructure and lifecycle management to digital transformation and the data centre edge.

That background is particularly relevant as Legrand India expands its focus on digital infrastructure.

Legrand has had a long presence in India and today operates with 5,000+ employees, seven manufacturing units and 35+ offices in the country. Its acquisition of Numeric in 2012 strengthened its position in power and energy-management solutions, adding another dimension to the Group’s infrastructure portfolio.

For Vinit, the move from UPS and power systems into a broader data centre strategy role is a natural extension of that experience.

That focus sits against rapid growth in India’s own capacity, which has risen from about 375 MW in 2020 to around 1,500 MW in 2025, according to IBEF, driven by cloud adoption, digital services, data localisation and, more recently, AI. The Ministry of Power expects electricity demand from data centres to reach 13.56 GW by 2031-32, which turns power availability into a planning constraint rather than a background concern.

One of the biggest changes he is seeing is the increase in rack density. Server racks that once operated in the 8 to 12 kW range are increasingly moving towards 80 to 100 kW, driven by AI and high-performance computing. The industry is also preparing for much higher densities in the future.

That change affects almost every infrastructure decision inside a data centre.

Cooling is moving closer to the source of heat, with rear-door heat exchangers, direct-to-chip liquid cooling and hybrid cooling architectures entering designs that once depended more heavily on conventional room-level cooling.

Power infrastructure is also becoming more modular.

Rather than installing an entire future capacity requirement on day one, operators are increasingly looking at infrastructure that can scale in stages. Vinit views this as important because customers need to align capital expenditure with actual compute demand while retaining the ability to expand.

The broader Legrand Data Center Solutions portfolio reflects this systems approach. The company works across low-voltage distribution, busbar trunking, UPS systems, racks, intelligent PDUs, connectivity, cooling and monitoring, alongside other elements of the data centre electrical environment. Legrand’s own data centre offering positions integrated expansion as a way of supporting present requirements while preparing for future capacity.

For Vinit, however, the key question is how those components work together.

That is also how the conversation is changing on the customer side: hyperscale and colocation operators, he says, are increasingly treating those elements as one integrated infrastructure discussion rather than as isolated product decisions, particularly around density, scalability and future expansion.

That perspective has also been influenced by his earlier work in product management and market strategy, where identifying future technology requirements formed part of his responsibilities.

Local capability is another area he considers important.

India’s data centre projects are increasingly being developed against tight timelines, making equipment availability, engineering response and service support commercially significant. Vinit sees local manufacturing and engineering capability as relevant not only for reducing import dependence but also for shortening response times and supporting project execution.

This approach fits into Legrand India’s wider operating model, which combines manufacturing, product development and digital infrastructure capabilities within the country. The Group has continued to expand local manufacturing and infrastructure capabilities over the years, including the integration of Numeric and other businesses into its Indian portfolio.

Vinit’s own career reflects a similar movement from specialised functions towards broader strategic responsibility.

His earlier roles exposed him to customer-facing sales, international markets, product development, pricing and brand strategy. Today, he applies that experience to an industry where technical infrastructure and commercial planning increasingly have to move together.

That is especially relevant as operators deploy mixed workloads.

A single data centre may support conventional enterprise computing in one section while another accommodates much higher-density AI workloads. The power and cooling architecture therefore needs to be flexible enough to support different requirements within the same facility.

As facilities become denser, operators require real-time visibility into energy consumption, capacity utilisation and equipment performance. Intelligent power distribution, metering and monitoring are therefore becoming part of everyday operations rather than remaining primarily reporting tools.

Energy efficiency forms another part of his approach.

At higher rack densities, electrical losses translate into additional heat, linking power efficiency directly to cooling demand. This makes relatively small efficiency improvements more meaningful at scale.

For Vinit, the role ultimately brings together several strands of his career: power infrastructure, product strategy, market development, technology adoption and long-term business planning.

His focus at Legrand India is now on applying those capabilities to a data centre market where operators increasingly need infrastructure that can be deployed quickly, expanded progressively and managed as a connected system.

“India’s challenge is unlikely to be the ambition to build capacity. The real test will be how quickly planned megawatts can be converted into reliable, usable computing capacity,” said Vinit Gupta, Head – Strategy and Digital Infrastructure, Legrand India.