In the first half of 2026, 183 global capability centers were opened or expanded in India, according to UnearthInsight data. Sixty-three of those came in January to March. The next quarter brought 120. US-headquartered companies accounted for 57% of the total.
Put those figures next to what happened to US work visas over the same months and a pattern appears. Companies that used to plan around bringing specialised engineers to headquarters are now planning the other way round. They’re taking the work to where the engineers already live.
Our view is simple. By 2030, a second engineering hub in India will be as ordinary for a mid-size US technology company as a second cloud region is today, and the reason will be continuity more than cost. The open question is how smaller companies get there without carrying the overhead that the giants can absorb.
The visa door for specialised talent keeps narrowing
Start with the $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions, which applied from 21 September 2025 to workers outside the United States. A federal court in Massachusetts vacated the policy behind it on 8 June 2026, and in July the First Circuit declined to pause that ruling. So the fee stopped being collected.
Then, on 18 September 2026, a proclamation extended the fee policy to 21 September 2027. An executive order signed the same day told the Labor Department, USCIS and the State Department to weigh an employer’s recent or planned layoffs of similar US workers at four separate points, from the wage filing all the way to the border.
For a strategy team, the legal detail matters less than the shape of it. A hiring plan for one senior machine learning engineer now has a court calendar inside it. And even in a calm year, an H-1B hire who wins the March lottery can’t start before 1 October.
AI roles feel this first. If you need someone who has shipped retrieval systems in production or cut inference costs on a GPU cluster, the candidate pool is small to begin with, and a large share of it was trained outside the US.
The biggest companies have already made their move
Target is the clearest example. About 5,700 people work at Target in India, in Bengaluru, and its leadership calls the site a “second headquarters.”
The company says roughly 40% of its global tech workforce is now based there, and the India team designs and delivers about 80% of Target’s US store remodels. That isn’t back-office work.
DoorDash took a two-step route. Its Pune office already handles software, data and analytics. On 30 September 2026 it opened a Hyderabad hub with 500 people in the first phase and a plan to pass 3,000 within two years, one of only three owned customer experience and integrity hubs it runs worldwide.
OpenAI is earlier on the curve. It opened in New Delhi and announced Bengaluru and Mumbai offices for 2026, partly because India now has more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users. Product companies tend to hire where their users and their talent overlap. India is both.
Three forces that make 2030 the tipping point
Policy risk becomes a fixed line item. Visa rules used to change every few years. Now they change by proclamation, get challenged in court and come back extended. Boards that treat that as a one-off disruption will keep getting surprised. Boards that price it in will want a second place to hire.
The early movers are doubling down. Of those 183 India centers in the first half of 2026, 110 were expansions of existing sites and only 73 were brand new. Companies that tried the model once are going bigger. That’s the clearest signal there is that it works.
AI tools reward teams that work across time zones. India sits 9.5 to 12.5 hours ahead of the US. With code review, testing and agent-driven tasks running asynchronously, a team in Bengaluru can pick up where San Francisco stopped and hand back finished work by morning. We expect that offset to look like an advantage, not a cost, well before 2030.
The part case studies leave out: an India hub is heavy to run
Here’s where the Target and DoorDash stories mislead smaller companies. Setting up your own Indian entity costs somewhere between $20,000 and $300,000 and typically takes three to six months before the first engineer signs. After that, local payroll, tax filings, statutory benefits, HR and finance add around 35% on top of total salary cost.
Money is the easier part. The harder cost is senior attention. Someone on the leadership team ends up learning Indian employment law, tracking the move to four consolidated labour codes, interviewing local accountants and flying out every quarter. For a 5,000-person retailer, that’s a line in a budget. For a 60-person Series B company, it’s the CTO’s spring.
So the gap that will define the next five years isn’t between companies that hire in India and companies that don’t. It’s between companies that can afford to build the machinery and companies that can’t.
What a second hub looks like for everyone else?
There’s a middle route, and it’s the one we expect most mid-size companies to take. An employer of record in India becomes the legal employer of your engineers, while you keep every decision that matters: who you hire, what you pay them, what they build and how they’re promoted.
That’s the model Kaamwork runs. You get 100% control of the team, with no entity to register and no Indian tax or compliance filings landing on your desk.
Kaamwork’s fee is $599 a month per engineer, on top of salary, and the team is in place in weeks rather than quarters. A guide to how companies hire in India without an entity covers the mechanics.
| Your own India entity | Kaamwork (Tech EOR) | |
| Time to first hire | 3 to 6 months | Days to weeks |
| Setup cost | $20,000 to $300,000 | None |
| Ongoing overhead | Around 35% on top of total salary cost | $599 per engineer per month, on top of salary |
| Control over hiring, pay and work | Full | Full |
| Tax, payroll and compliance | Your team | Kaamwork |
| Senior leadership time | Heavy, ongoing | Minimal |
None of this rules out an owned center later. Plenty of companies prove the team through an EOR first, then build a GCC in India once headcount justifies the structure.
Five questions for strategy teams to answer before 2030
- Which of our roles would we struggle to fill if US visa rules tightened again next year?
- What would we give an India team to own outright, not just support?
- How much leadership time can we spend building local infrastructure?
- At what headcount does our own entity start to pay for itself?
- If the fee comes back in 2027, how many hires does our current plan put at risk?
If question five makes the room go quiet, the second hub is already overdue. Teams scoping roles can see where it’s possible to hire developers in India across Python, React, Node.js and other stacks.
The companies that come out of this decade in good shape won’t be the ones that guessed the visa rules correctly. They’ll be the ones that stopped needing to.
Kaamwork helps US, UK and ANZ companies build and run engineering teams in India. This article is for general information and is not legal or immigration advice.
