In Powai, a neighborhood better known for its lake and IIT Bombay, a different kind of landmark is taking shape: a 2 million square feet Global Capability Centre that aims to be the largest of its kind in Asia by the time it is completed in 2029. The campus, developed by Brookfield on a six-acre plot under a long-term agreement with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, will be entirely occupied by a marquee multinational bank—widely understood in industry circles to be JP Morgan—which plans to use this single site to knit together vast swathes of its global operations. For Mumbai, the project is more than just another office block; it is a signal that the city wants to reclaim its status as a hard-wired global finance hub in the age of AI, cloud, and 24×7 digital banking.
Brookfield’s decision to invest over 1 billion dollars, or about ₹9,000 crore, into this GCC is a clear statement of long-term conviction. The development is structured as a 20-year commitment with the bank, giving rare visibility on occupancy and cash flows in a sector that often works on much shorter leasing cycles. By the time the campus is fully operational, it is expected to directly and indirectly support upwards of 30,000 high-skilled jobs, plugging thousands of engineers, data scientists, quants, cybersecurity experts, and operations specialists into one of the world’s most sophisticated banking networks from a single Indian location.For Brookfield, already one of India’s largest office space owners with a deep portfolio in Mumbai, Powai is both a trophy asset and a bet that the GCC story still has a long runway.
For JP Morgan, the Powai GCC is the sharp tip of a much larger India strategy that has been quietly playing out in square feet and headcount. The bank has already leased large swathes of space in Bengaluru’s Embassy Tech Village, Hyderabad’s Knowledge City, and multiple offices across Mumbai, building a network that supports everything from technology and analytics to risk, compliance, and back-end trading operations. Industry estimates suggest that JP Morgan now employs around 55,000 people in India, and deals like a recent 176,000 square feet lease in Hyderabad—reportedly locked in for nine years at over ₹250 crore annually—show that this is not opportunistic expansion but a structured, multi-city buildout.[8][10][5] In that context, Powai looks less like a sudden leap and more like the natural next step: a dedicated mega-campus that becomes the “brain and spine” of its Asia and global support architecture.
The wider backdrop is a GCC boom that has turned India into the world’s favourite capability destination. Recent data shows that GCCs accounted for roughly 42% of India’s total office space absorption in FY25, with large deals—those above 100,000 square feet—rising sharply as global firms doubled down on scale. Total office absorption is projected to cross 75–80 million square feet in 2025, and analysts attribute a big chunk of that momentum to the rapid expansion and upgrading of GCCs across technology, banking, engineering, and R&D. Between early 2024 and late 2025, India has seen the addition of around a hundred new GCCs, with US, European, and Japanese companies all racing to lock in talent and long-term real estate in cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, NCR, and Mumbai.
What makes this new generation of GCCs different is that they do not see themselves as “back offices” anymore; they are front-line engines of innovation and resilience. In the Powai project, Brookfield has explicitly highlighted design for AI-led workflows, advanced technology stacks, and research-driven functions, underlining that this will be a home for high-value activities rather than routine processing. Maharashtra’s government has responded with a dedicated GCC policy aimed at attracting exactly these kinds of large, high-skill investments, and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has framed the Powai deal as a cornerstone in the state’s bid to become India’s GCC capital. With Brookfield also signing an MoU to channel around 12 billion dollars of investment into the Mumbai metropolitan region over time, the Powai campus sits inside a much larger story of infrastructure, urban transformation, and global capital crowding into India’s financial heartland.
In the end, the image that emerges is almost cinematic: a dense, vertical campus on the Powai skyline, lit late into the night, where trading support floors coexist with AI labs and cloud engineering teams, all wired into a banking grid that stretches from New York and London to Singapore and Tokyo. For young Indian professionals, it promises thousands of high-paying roles in a single location; for Mumbai, it anchors the city’s shift from being just the home of Dalal Street to a global command centre for modern finance and technology. And for JP Morgan and Brookfield, it is a shared wager that the next decade of global banking will be built, coded, tested, and run in large part from India—starting with six acres in Powai.
