According to reports, the State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender, is setting up a unit to manage project financing solutions for new-age industries such as artificial intelligence, e-commerce, and fintech.

The public sector bank plans to complete the project within a year and will hire “specialized professionals” to staff it, said Ashwini Kumar Tewari, a managing director at the bank.
“It’s also in the process of appointing an external consultant,” adds Ashwini.

The project will aid in broadening the scope of the bank's project financing and structuring division, which evaluates structures and provides funding for significant infrastructure projects.

SBI's project financing portfolios increasingly consist of loans to renewable energy and so-called new age companies.

Spending will increase in several sectors as Prime Minister Narendra Modi improves India's infrastructure. During the fiscal year 2024, SBI's project financing and structuring unit provided funding for 48 major projects.

According to Tewari, the unit, which will be dubbed a "centre of excellence for project financing," would also exchange knowledge with other financial organisations.

The development coincides with the expansion of new-age tech industries like banking and e-commerce, which have been fuelled by improvements in smartphone accessibility and increased internet usage over the past ten or so years. By 2030, there will be 1.2 billion internet users in India, up from the current 820 million.

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In addition, the country is seeing an exponential increase in the use of generative AI as the technology takes the world by storm. As a result, several domestic and international businesses are establishing data centers in India.

OpenAI is said to have begun discussions to set up data centers in India, while the likes of AWS and Blackstone have also committed investments of billions of dollars to establish data centers.