Television network dumps entertainment for artificial intelligence

MUMBAI: In a dramatic reinvention that would make any consultant proud, Sri Adhikari Brothers Television Network Ltd is ditching its media heritage for the lucrative world of artificial intelligence. The Mumbai-listed company announced on 24 November that it plans to rebrand as Aqylon Nexus Ltd and build a 50-megawatt AI and green data centre in Telangana.

The board, led by additional director Kiran Kumar Inampudi, has binned the company’s main business objectives—previously focused on television—and replaced them with AI, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, robotics and data science. The new mandate reads like a Silicon Valley pitch deck, promising “AI-powered products, decision-support systems, automation tools, analytics platforms and other intelligent software systems” for everything from healthcare to government.

The transformation comes with housekeeping. The company has accepted the resignation of its statutory auditor, Hitesh Shah & Associates, and appointed Bilimoria Mehta & Co in its place. More tellingly, it has withdrawn applications for in-principle approval to issue 1.5 crore equity shares and 6.8 crore convertible warrants—suggesting the television business’s fundraising plans are now obsolete.

Shareholders will vote on the changes through a postal ballot, with e-voting running from 3 December  to 5 January. Krina Gokulkumar Shah, a practising company secretary, will scrutinise the process.

The proposed Telangana data centre, the company claims, will create a “strategic sovereign compute platform” supporting India’s national AI ambitions whilst strengthening digital, defence, governance, enterprise and archival infrastructure. Whether viewers of Sri Adhikari Brothers’ television content will follow them into the cloud remains to be seen.