Cloudera, Intel join hands to scale enterprise AI adoption across India, APAC

Cloudera, a U.S.-based hybrid data platform company, on Wednesday, announced a collaboration with Intel Corporation to accelerate enterprise-grade AI adoption across India and the broader Asia Pacific (APAC) region. The partnership integrates Intel Xeon 6 processors with Cloudera’s AI stack, enabling enterprises to deploy and manage advanced AI workloads efficiently across hybrid and on-premise environments.

The move comes at a time when India is fast emerging as both a key innovation hub and growth market for Cloudera. Over the past two years, the company has ramped up its local investments—committing nearly ₹500 crore to expand its Bengaluru-based Centre of Excellence (CoE) and grow its engineering strength to over 600 professionals. The India CoE contributes to Cloudera’s global product development in areas such as data warehousing, cloud-native analytics, machine learning, and cybersecurity, while also supporting an expanding customer base across sectors like banking, telecom, and government.

“Enterprises are no longer experimenting with AI—they're executing at scale, and that demands a platform built for real-world complexity,” Remus Lim, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Cloudera said in a select media briefing. “Cloudera AI brings intelligence to data, backed by enterprise-grade security, governance, and flexibility. Our deep collaboration with Intel ensures that our customers in India and across APAC can turn AI innovation into tangible business outcomes.”

Santhosh Viswanathan, Vice President and Managing Director, India Region, Intel, added that the partnership underscores the growing need for efficient and responsible AI deployment. “As enterprises accelerate their AI rollouts, the Cloudera stack powered by Intel’s enterprise-ready AI platforms will help customers unlock value from their data faster, more securely, and at scale,” he said.

A joint whitepaper released by the two companies outlines how the collaboration will drive innovation in areas such as Agentic AI and Human-in-the-Loop systems, Conversational AI powered by automatic speech recognition and named entity recognition on-premises, and Small Language Models (SLMs) designed for efficient, enterprise-scale operations. It also explores the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which connects data marts with large language models for secure, seamless access to enterprise data.

Piyush Agarwal, SE Leader, Cloudera, told TechCircle that enterprises today need the flexibility to run AI and analytics anywhere—across cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments. “Cloudera’s open data lakehouse architecture empowers them to do just that by unifying data, analytics, and AI on a single, secure platform.” 

“With innovations like Agentic AI, we’re enabling organisations to bring intelligence closer to their data, ensuring faster insights, stronger governance, and enterprise-grade scalability. Our focus is on helping Indian enterprises accelerate AI adoption responsibly, while staying open, interoperable, and future-ready," he added.

The company believes that by combining Intel’s hardware innovation with Cloudera’s hybrid data and AI platform, the partnership aims to accelerate India’s enterprise AI transformation—turning the country’s data-rich ecosystem into a driver of next-generation business intelligence.