Shares of data centre- and AI-linked companies extended gains for a second straight session on Monday, with buying interest focused on names exposed to India’s digital infrastructure build-out after the Union Budget 2026-27 introduced a long-duration tax incentive for global cloud service providers. In early trade, E2E Networks hit a 10% upper circuit at Rs. 2,526 on the National Stock Exchange of India, while Anant Raj Industries rose about 7.5% to an intraday high of Rs. 570.55; Netweb Technologies and Techno Electric & Engineering were also higher by about 5.3% and 2.9%, respectively, even as the Nifty traded largely flat around 24,832.95 at the time.

The trigger was the budget proposal, announced by Nirmala Sitharaman, to provide a tax holiday until 2047 for foreign firms offering global cloud services through data centres based in India, with the condition that services for Indian users are routed via a domestic reseller. The intent is to attract global cloud players to build and serve from India and to reduce concerns around future tax exposure linked to global income being serviced via India-based data centres.

Analysts expect the measure to be supportive for project economics because data centres are capital-intensive with long payback periods, and tax certainty can improve returns and cash-flow visibility, factors that typically accelerate capacity decisions by global tenants. The market’s stock-specific reaction reflects this linkage across the value chain: cloud infrastructure providers and data-centre operators/landlords on expectations of higher utilisation and expansion, hardware suppliers on potential incremental server/HPC demand, and power/EPC enablers on the back of higher build-out activity.