Zoho unveils Nathu La, a designed-in-house server

Zoho Corporation has announced the launch of Nathu La—its indigenously designed server. Nathu La marks a pivotal step in Zoho Corp.'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). The R&D work for it was done in Nagpur by local talent recruited and trained by Zoho. The Nathu La server, comprising Intel Xeon 6 processors, was developed collaboratively with Intel, leveraging their enablement capabilities and technical expertise. 

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.

"We are proud to build a server system that is truly designed in India and taking a step towards creating sovereign technology," said Shailesh Davey, CEO, Zoho Corp. "The development of the Nathu La server reflects our commitment to creating complex technology powered by talent from smaller towns and villages. 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."

Nathu La Server

In 2020, Zoho had set up a small team in Nagpur to work on R&D projects such as designing a server. In 2023, the Indian government announced import restrictions on compute devices including servers, further highlighting the necessity to develop this technology in the country.

The Nathu La server motherboard and chassis platform is the result of over 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 in-turn results in improved performance of Zoho apps for the 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) — designed in-house by Zoho's hardware engineering team and assembled by Indian 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.

Building the full technology stack

Zoho Corporation has invested in building its own technology stack from ground up over the last three decades, and the Nathu La server launch is in-line with that goal. The design philosophy behind NathuLa is rooted in the Open Compute Project (OCP), emphasising modularity, thermal efficiency, and ease of maintenance — enabling Zoho's data centres to significantly reduce total cost of ownership and power consumption.

Zoho plans to host its applications on the NathuLa 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 would also help in bringing down inference cost for Zoho's AI usage.

"‌With AI advancements, inference costs are rising rapidly. With our strategy of using contextual, right-sized models, running on our own platform, on our own servers, in our own data centres, we are compounding the benefits accrued from owning and operating our entire technology stack. This ensures that our solutions are more sustainable and accessible for businesses. These long-term R&D investments we are making at every layer of the stack are aimed at delivering customer value," added Davey.

SETU: Building hardware engineering talent in Tier 2 town

Zoho also runs a skilling initiative at its Nagpur office called SETU — Student's Engagement for Transformative Upskilling. It was designed to build a pipeline of industry-ready engineers in Tier 2 towns. Employees hired through this programme have been working on various R&D projects, including on NathuLa server.

SETU is an engagement programme targeting students in their 5th semester and above from engineering colleges across Central India, built around advanced learning in Electronics System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM). The programme is aligned with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's (MeitY) Skill Development Policy for the sector. So far over 300 students have been trained through this programme, some of whom have been placed with Zoho.

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.

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.