San Francisco/Mumbai: India-based IT services firm Infosys Ltd said it plans to hire 10,000 US workers in the next two years and open four technology centers in the United States, starting with a center this August in Indiana, the home state of US Vice President Mike Pence.
The move comes at a time when Infosys and some of its Indian peers such as Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Ltd have become political targets in the United States for allegedly displacing U S workers' jobs by flying in foreigners on temporary visas to service US clients.
The IT service firms rely heavily on the H1-B visa program, which US President Donald Trump told federal agencies to review.
Other Indian outsourcing firms have recruited in the United States, but Infosys is the first to give concrete hiring numbers and a timeline for its plans, following Trump's visa review.
The plans would mark a big increase in US hiring by
Infosys. In 2014, when Vishal Sikka became chief executive, the firm had said it would hire 2,000 people in the United States.
In a telephone interview with Reuters from Indiana, Sikka said Infosys had achieved that goal and now wanted to hire US workers in fields such as artificial intelligence, cloud and big data.
"We started small at first and have been growing since then," Sikka said, adding that the timing of the decision was not related to the visa review.
"The reality is bringing in local talent and mixing that with the best of global talent in the times we are living in and the times we're entering is the right thing to do," he said.
Infosys said it would seek experienced tech professionals and recent graduates from universities and community colleges.
The 10,000 new US jobs will form a small part of Infosys' overall workforce of over 200,000.
Last month, two industry sources told Reuters that Infosys was applying for just under 1,000 H-1B visas this year. One of the sources said that was down from about 6,500 applications in 2016 and some 9,000 in 2015.
Indian IT service firms, which typically flood the lottery system each year with thousands of applications, have been among the largest H1-B recipients annually.
