Zoho just built its own server, called Nathu La, from scratch and named after a mountain pass between India and China.
The server is the latest piece in Zoho’s long-running plan to own every layer of its technology, from the hardware up to the apps you actually use.
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The company built it in partnership with Intel, using Intel Xeon 6 processors.
Zoho’s Nathu La server
Zoho isn’t new to doing things itself. The company has spent close to three decades building its own tech stack instead of renting someone else’s.
In the video below, Mickey Stanley (head of corporate comms at Zoho) and Ramprakash Ramamoorthy (head of Zoho Labs) discusses the company’s ambitious long-term bet.
Andrew Bourne, regional head of Zoho in South Africa, explained the thinking behind it: “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.”
Bourne says with Zoho’s strategy of “using contextual, right-sized models, running on our own platform, on our own servers, in our own data centres”, the company will be compounding the benefits accrued from owning and operating its 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,” Bourne explained.
The payoff, according to Zoho, is a 20 to 30% drop in total cost of ownership and 12 to 18% less power consumption, all while matching the performance of standard server setups.
Less power and lower costs also mean cheaper AI inference, which is the part of running AI models that tends to quietly eat budgets.
Zoho Nathu La: under the hood
The server took five years of work across hardware, firmware, and systems management. It’s built around the Open Compute Project’s design principles, which focus on modularity and thermal efficiency, basically making the thing easier to maintain and cool down.
Inside, you’ll find a custom power delivery system and an in-house Data Centre Secure Control Module, plus a modular chassis that can adapt to different deployment setups.
Zoho’s hardware team designed all of it internally, including the network interface card, and the company has filed more than five patents covering thermal management and cost-efficient server design.
The server is built to handle virtualisation, high performance computing, AI inference, and storage, which covers most of what a modern data centre actually needs to do.
Training engineers
Back in 2020, Zoho set up a small R&D team in Nagpur, a Tier 2 city in India, to work on server design and systems engineering.
Some of that team came through SETU, short for Student’s Engagement for Transformative Upskilling, a programme Zoho runs to train engineers in electronics system design and manufacturing.
More than 300 students have been through SETU so far, and some of them are now working on the actual hardware Zoho is shipping.
Tech sovereignty
Zoho is framing Nathu La as a step toward technological sovereignty, meaning less reliance on outside vendors for security audits, firmware updates, and licensing. Owning the hardware layer means owning the security decisions too.
Whether “technological sovereignty” becomes the industry buzz phrase of the year remains to be seen. But building your own servers instead of leasing capacity from someone else is a fairly concrete way to back up the claim.
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