If tech talent can’t come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is.
Hiring by Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Google has risen sharply in India in recent months. This trend coincides with the growing scrutiny of the H-1B visa, often used by tech companies to bring international talent to the U.S.
There were about 4,200 open positions at these companies in India as of February 5, Anuj Agrawal, founder and CEO of talent advisory and recruitment firm Zyoin Group, told Rest of World.
Of the current openings, just 15% are for entry-level roles that require less than three years of experience, while AI, machine learning, cloud, and cybersecurity roles comprise nearly half of the vacancies.
This probably has been the strongest growth in several years.”
In 2025, these companies added around 33,000 workers in India, a roughly 18% increase from the previous year, Bengaluru-based human resources expert N. Shivakumar told Rest of World.
“This probably has been the strongest growth in several years,” Shivakumar said. “There is so much abundance of mature talent available — not just talent which is doing the basic job, but they are into deep tech, deep learning, and they’re heavily into AI.”
Based on early signs, Shivakumar expects an even steeper uptick in U.S. tech giants’ hiring in India in 2026.
Experts believe a big reason for this rush to hire in India is the recent clampdown on the H-1B visa program, which allows highly skilled workers to live and work in the U.S. for up to six years.
The H-1B has undergone major changes under President Donald Trump, making it much harder to get. Its fee has been increased from around $5,000 per petition to $100,000, among other updates. There has also been a sharp rise in rejections and tighter scrutiny of applicants.
This “changed the math entirely,” Agrawal said, referring to the impact of the recent changes on businesses that have depended on the H-1B in the past.
The trend poses a risk to tech companies, which are among the biggest beneficiaries of the H-1B. In 2025, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple were among the top 10 H-1B visa recipients.
The majority of H-1B workers in the tech sector each year are from India.
According to a 2024 study by a University of Pennsylvania researcher, companies that are heavily focused on research and development often navigate visa restrictions by outsourcing jobs outside the U.S. For every H-1B rejection, companies hire 0.4-0.9 employees abroad, and most of these roles are concentrated in India, China, and Canada, the study found.
“Unlike other firms, multinational companies have the option of responding to restrictions on skilled immigration by offshoring their high-skilled activities,” the study noted.
On February 3, Bloomberg reported that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was looking to lease up to 2.4 million square feet of additional office space in Bengaluru. At full capacity, that space could accommodate up to 20,000 people, more than doubling its current India head count. Agrawal estimates over 2,000 of these positions will be related to machine learning, and 1,000 to AI, requiring skills like chip design and data science.
Bengaluru is already home to Google’s largest workforce outside the U.S. As of this month, Google had 365 open positions in India posted on its website, with more than two-thirds listed in Bengaluru.
Most other major American tech companies, too, have a large presence in India. Bengaluru is home to Microsoft’s first and largest R&D center outside the U.S. India also hosts Microsoft’s second-largest workforce. The same is true for Amazon.
Amazon and Microsoft have committed $35 billion and $17.5 billion, respectively, for AI innovation and jobs in India before the end of the decade. India already comprises half of the world’s workforce in global capacity centers, or GCCs — specialized, company-owned offshore units established by multinational corporations to perform high-value, strategic functions like IT services, R&D, and analytics. Around 2 million Indians currently work at GCCs.