Bengaluru leads India’s GCC boom, Pune emerges as major hub

Bengaluru stayed the biggest prize in India’s GCC race, with KPMG’s latest data putting the city at 1,050 to 1,100 units in FY26. But the bigger signal for employers was not just scale: Hyderabad and Pune were still rising behind it, and Pune was sharpening into a serious second-tier hub rather than a spillover market.

India’s total GCC base reached about 3,400 to 3,600 units, with Bengaluru adding 58 new centres as of June 2026. That concentration matters for KPMG’s own staffing and client model. The firms that want deep bench strength for audit, tax, technology and advisory work are still clustering where the talent pool is deepest, but the pressure is also building fastest in the same places.

Pune’s case showed how the next phase of competition is shifting. KPMG’s June 2026 whitepaper said the city hosted more than 500 GCCs from over 30 countries, accounted for about 14% of India’s GCC units and about 9% of total GCC talent, and had seen 130-plus GCCs enter or expand there since 2024. Its GCC ecosystem was growing at roughly 9% CAGR, supported by an industrial base that now stretches across more than 20 industries.

For KPMG, that makes Pune more than a satellite to Bengaluru. U.S.-headquartered firms anchored about 55% of Pune’s GCC base, which points to steady demand from the same global clients that are also buying more transformation, finance, risk and managed-services advice from Big Four firms. Pune’s annual output of about 200,000 graduates, including about 90,000 STEM graduates, also makes it a meaningful hiring market for firms trying to staff data, digital and engineering-heavy work without overrelying on Bengaluru’s more expensive labour pool.

The strategic backdrop is that India’s GCC landscape has expanded far beyond the 1,580-plus centres KPMG said existed by FY2023. Maharashtra’s GCC Policy 2025 aims to establish 400 new GCCs and create 4 lakh high-skilled jobs, which gives Pune and the wider state a policy tailwind as companies weigh operating costs, talent access and resilience.

KPMG has been framing GCCs as innovation engines and strategic partners, not just support units, and the geography now matches that rhetoric. Bengaluru still leads, Hyderabad remains in the fight, and Pune is no longer waiting in the wings. It is becoming part of the core location strategy for enterprise clients, and that changes where KPMG recruits, where it builds delivery teams and how it competes for the next wave of advisory work.