Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal has identified financial services, data centres and Airtel Cloud as the company's three key growth engines, signalling the telecom major's strategy to diversify beyond connectivity and strengthen its digital services portfolio.

Mittal said Airtel Money, which recently received Reserve Bank of India (RBI) approval to operate as a non-deposit-taking NBFC, "will be suitably capitalised over the years". On the data centre business, he said Nxtra is "on track to build 1 GW of capacity over the next few years", supported by a US$1 billion fundraise from marquee investors alongside Airtel's participation. He added that Airtel Cloud is witnessing encouraging early traction by offering sovereign, telco-grade cloud services hosted within India.