Nissan India will be setting up a digital hub at Technocity in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Nissan says that the digital hub will be a research and development facility of sorts that will also be used by the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance. The main idea to develop the digital hub is to focus on the research and development towards electric and autonomous vehicles. To begin with, the Kerala government will allot 30 acres to Nissan in order to setup the hub during the first phase. In the second phase, the government will give Nissan additional 40 acres. Nissan's digital and innovation hub will be called Nissan knowledge city.
The digital and innovation hub will act as a talent pool of people who will be working on cognitive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning and so on. Once the hub is up and running, Nissan will be creating approximately 3,000 direct jobs along with few thousand indirect jobs as well.
The reasons behind choosing Kerala as the base for its digital and innovation hub are; abundance of IT and engineering professionals, cost effectiveness, less traffic, airport connectivity along with other things. The government of Kerala will sign the Memorandum of Understanding with Nissan on 29 June, 2018.
This will be Nissan's fifth digital hub globally after having centres in Japan, China, France and USA. To start off with, the company will occupy the Technopark Phase III campus and a part of the co-developer space as well. The Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance is betting big on electric vehicles and aims to not only launch 17 new electric models by 2022 but also rake in annual electric vehicles sales to the tune of 14 million units as well.
