Zoho Corporation, one of the global technology company and parent company of Zoho and ManageEngine, on June 10th, announced the launch of Nathu La, a designed-in-house server and a pivotal step in the company’s journey toward building its full technology stack, from the hardware layer to the software applications. With Nathu La, Zoho has achieved equivalent performance with 12-18% lower power consumption and 20-30% lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and in turn, brought down inference cost. The Nathu La server, comprising Intel Xeon 6 processors, was developed collaboratively with Intel, leveraging their enablement capabilities and technical expertise.
“Zoho Corporation has invested in building its own technology stack from the ground up over the last three decades. The Nathu La server launch is in line with that goal,” said Shailesh Davey, CEO of Zoho Corporation. “With Zoho’s strategy of using contextual, right-sized models, running on our own platform, now on our own servers, accelerated by our own GPU database, we are compounding the benefits accrued from owning and operating our entire technology stack. These long-term R&D investments we are making at every layer of the stack are aimed at delivering customer value and ensuring that our solutions are more sustainable and accessible for businesses than the competition.”
Building the full technology stack
The design philosophy behind Nathu La is rooted in the Open Compute Project (OCP), emphasising modularity, thermal efficiency, and ease of maintenance, and enabling Zoho’s data centres to significantly reduce total cost of ownership and power consumption.
Zoho plans to host its applications on the Nathu La server platform, enabling the company to optimise the full software-hardware stack for its specific workloads, reduce cost, improve performance, and strengthen data governance for its global customers. This will also help in bringing down inference cost for Zoho’s AI usage.
Developed with homegrown hardware engineering talent
India’s digital infrastructure is expanding at an unprecedented pace. Yet, the server technology underpinning that infrastructure has historically been sourced from abroad, with Indian enterprises paying royalties and licensing fees to foreign entities. Zoho Corp. is one of the few technology companies to have designed a homegrown server platform—with all intellectual property owned in India.
In 2020, Zoho set up a small team in Nagpur to work on R&D projects such as designing a server. Members of the Nathu La R&D team include new hires from SETU —short for Student’s Engagement for Transformative Upskilling—an initiative designed to build a pipeline of industry-ready engineers from colleges across Central India, with a focus on advanced learning in Electronics System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM).
The initiative directly confronts a growing concern in technical education: the erosion of foundational skills in an era of AI-assisted learning. By placing hands-on innovation and first-principles problem solving at the centre of the curriculum, SETU is designed to rebuild the research depth, critical thinking, creativity and applied engineering knowledge that surface-level AI usage tends to weaken. So far, over 300 students have been trained through this program, some of whom have been placed with Zoho.
“The development of the Nathu La server reflects our commitment to creating complex technology powered by talent from smaller towns and villages,” added Davey. Through focused investments in R&D and skill development, this foray into hardware enables us not only to build and own the technology, but also to cultivate the expertise and talent behind it.”
What’s Inside
The Nathu La server motherboard and chassis platform is the result of five years of R&D across hardware, firmware, and systems management. Based on Intel Xeon 6 Processors, the server is designed to optimise performance for virtualisation (VM), High Performance Computing (HPC), AI inference, and storage applications. This results in improved performance of Zoho apps for end users.
The server has customised power delivery subsystems, an in-house DC-SCM (Data Centre Secure Control Module) design, and modular chassis options compatible with diverse end-user environments, offering flexibility across deployment types.
All modular components—including the DC-SCM and NIC (Network Interface Card) — are designed in-house by Zoho’s hardware engineering team and assembled by Indian Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) partners, ensuring end-to-end domestic value addition. Over five patents have been filed covering cutting-edge thermal management and cost-optimised server architecture designs.
Moving Towards Technological Sovereignty
Nathu La is engineered with hardware-rooted security at every layer of the stack. The platform’s entirely indigenous IP means there is no dependency on foreign entities for security audits, firmware updates, or licensing continuity.
The solution is also fully aligned with the Open Source Software (OSS) policy and the highest Local Content Policy (total values that is sourced in India), ensuring maximum value addition within the country for government procurement. The solution further supports government initiatives such as Make in India, Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan, and NSM (National Supercomputing Mission), strengthening India’s capability in high-performance computing and sovereign digital infrastructure.
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