Digital Divide Data (DDD), a global provider of artificial intelligence and data services, has started operations at its Global Capability Centre in Dehradun, with the facility focused on robotics, physical AI and generative AI data services.
Located at Doon IT Park, the facility is DDD's first Global Capability Centre in India. It has already onboarded around 150 employees and plans to expand its workforce to between 800 and 1,000 in the coming months, potentially creating a significant pool of specialised AI roles in Uttarakhand.
The centre will support global clients working on AI and machine learning applications, with capabilities spanning data ingestion and curation, multimodal data annotation, AI model evaluation, large language model fine-tuning support and data preparation and validation.
A key area of focus will be physical AI and robotics. Teams at the Dehradun centre will work on collecting and annotating egocentric video, sensor and multimodal datasets that can be used to train machine learning systems to understand and interact with real-world environments.
DDD is also working on data for low-resource Indian languages, including Garhwali, as part of efforts to improve the representation of regional languages and cultural context in AI models.
The company said Dehradun was selected after evaluating locations including Noida, Gurugram, Lucknow and Hyderabad. The availability of technical talent and academic institutions in Uttarakhand played a role in the decision. DDD is working with institutions including UPES and the Women Institute of Technology to develop a local talent pipeline.
Hiring at the centre is focused partly on fresh graduates and local candidates, with recruits undergoing structured induction and role-specific training before joining live projects.
According to DDD Chief Operating Officer Steve Larson, India has become an important market for enterprise AI, while Dehradun provides an opportunity to develop technology careers for professionals without requiring them to relocate to larger technology hubs.
DDD currently provides datasets for global clients, including work supporting task-driven applications in areas such as manufacturing and hospitality. The company has also indicated that similar AI capabilities could potentially be applied to areas including disaster management and infrastructure development.
Over the next three years, DDD plans to develop the Dehradun facility into a Centre of Excellence capable of handling increasingly complex AI, robotics and physical AI assignments for its global operations.
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