Telangana has world’s largest Innovation Campus

Telangana is building the world's largest Innovation Campus spread across 24.3 lakh square feet in 18 acres comprising the trio of T-Hub, T-Works and the upcoming IMAGE Tower

Hyderabad: Telangana is building the world’s largest Innovation Campus spread across 24.3 lakh square feet in 18 acres comprising the trio of T-Hub, T-Works and the upcoming IMAGE Tower. While T-Hub was inaugurated in June last year, T-Works, which had a soft launch a few months ago, was formally inaugurated on Thursday. The last cog, IMAGE Tower, is expected to be completed this year.

“We are hoping that the IMAGE Tower will be ready this year. It would have been ready if it were not for the impact of the Covid pandemic,” IT and Industries Minister KT Rama Rao said.

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T-Hub, which turned seven in November, is the world’s largest innovation campus. It has plans to set up regional centres in all IT Parks that the State government is setting up in Tier 2 and 3 locations. Its focus is on the 6Ms– Mentors, Market, Motivation, Manpower, Money, Methodologies- and 2Ps, Partnership and Policy advisory.

The T-shaped T-Hub structure was launched in June. It is spread over 5.8 lakh sq ft. T-Hub can house over 2,000 startups. It has 10 floors and will house startups, corporates, investors, academia, and national and international ecosystem enablers. The State has invested more than Rs 300 crore on the new facility.

A brainchild of Rama Rao, T-Hub (Technology Hub) was conceived to bring the missing links in the startup ecosystem. While Hyderabad was good in the IT and allied areas, it still was not the chosen destination for startups. By inertia, they choose Bengaluru for their operations and expansions. T-Hub changed that equation quickly to put Hyderabad strongly on the startup map of India. T-Hub has supported more than 1,800 startups and over 600 corporates. It helped the startups to raise about $2 billion (about Rs 16,400 crore).

T-works initially began working from temporary premises at Begumpet. It moved to the current premises eight months ago. So far, it created more than 1,000 prototypes. T-Works also made the ventilator and an oxygen concentrator during the pandemic. “We designed the ventilator in real quick time,” said Sujai Karampuri, T-Works CEO. It also helped a few ideas from rural areas.

“We will grow ten-fold in terms of machines and facilities in six months to one year,” he said. The current facility is about 78,000 sq ft and it will ultimately increase to 2.5 lakh sqft.

Construction of the Innovation in Animation, Multimedia, Gaming and Entertainment (IMAGE) tower is underway. This will be 16 lakh sq ft (1.6 million sq ft). “There is a lot of demand for IMAGE Tower from segment stakeholders. OTT is rising. Hyderabad is the centre for the film industry (multiple languages),” said Rama Rao.

IMAGE Tower will have six studios including one large studio with a typical studio floor of 120ft X 100 Ft. It will also have a similar-sized motion capture as well as green matt studios. It will also have Digital Intermediate (DI) suite, audio and video editing labs, data management labs, dubbing suite, data centre, auditorium and two theatres for screening. These form part of the physical infrastructure at the 1.6 million sq ft facility.

The virtual infrastructure comprises a render farm, data centre, band width (internal and external) and shared software license for gaming and animation occupiers. The render farm will have applications for post-production, sophisticated 3D, visual effects (VFX), and animation, among others.