Zscaler and Bharti Airtel Launch AI & Cyber Threat Research Center in India

Zscaler, Inc., the leader in cloud security, together with Bharti Airtel, India's largest telecommunication service providers, announced the launch of the AI & Cyber Threat Research Center - India on February 20, 2026, in New Delhi.

This multi-stakeholder initiative aims to advance national cyber resilience, protect critical sectors like telecommunications, banking, and energy, safeguard digital users, and accelerate trusted AI adoption amid India's rapid digital expansion. Designed "In India, For India," the center fosters public-private collaboration with academia and government to build talent pipelines and secure systems at population scale toward Viksit Bharat.

India faces escalating threats, with Zscaler's ThreatLabz India noting millions of monthly infiltration attempts, including nation-state espionage tied to geopolitical tensions, 1.2 million intrusions from 20,000 sources targeting 58 entities, and rising zero-day exploits. Legacy perimeter security falls short against AI-powered attackers, necessitating Zero Trust architecture.

Strategic Pillars

The center focuses on four pillars: Protect (real-time intelligence for resilience); Remediate (direct government partnerships to neutralize attacks); Facilitate (AI-driven defenses and Zero Trust adoption); Build (cybersecurity talent via certifications).

Zscaler contributes global intelligence from its Zero Trust Exchange™ platform (500B+ daily transactions) and a dedicated India threat research team. Airtel provides IoT/mobile traffic visibility for faster threat detection and ecosystem coordination. Additional public/private sector members will join to broaden impact.

Gopal Vittal, Airtel Executive Vice Chairman, stated: "At Airtel, our commitment has been to safeguard our customers and the nation's digital fabric. This partnership with Zscaler marks a significant extension of this commitment that will combine the power of our AI capabilities and deep scale for cybersecurity research to protect the country's expanding digital ecosystem."

Jay Chaudhry, Zscaler CEO, Chairman, and Founder, added: "India is building digital systems at an unmatched population scale. You cannot secure this level of ambition with legacy firewalls and VPNs that were never designed for a hyper-connected world. It demands a modern Zero Trust architecture that is secure-by-design. With the AI & Cyber Threat Research Center - India, we will bring the full power of the world's largest security cloud to protect the nation's public and private sectors."

Shares of Bharti Airtel Limited was last trading in BSE at Rs. 1977.70 as compared to the previous close of Rs. 1990.30. The total number of shares traded during the day was 224535 in over 5897 trades.

The stock hit an intraday high of Rs. 1993.95 and intraday low of 1970.45. The net turnover during the day was Rs. 444627427.00.

Source : Equity Bulls

Keywords

BhartiAirtel INE397D01024 TelecomServices Zscaler ResearchCenter India