Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to invest 1,05,600 crores (US $12.7 billion) into the Indian cloud infrastructure market by 2030 to meet growing customer demand in the country.

The investment, announced at the AWS Summit in Mumbai, is planned to be for India’s data centre infrastructure and will support more than 130,000 full-time equivalent jobs in Indian businesses each year, ranging from construction and engineering, to telecoms.

Alongside the building of infrastructure itself, AWS will hope the investment will train citizens with cloud skills – more than four million in India since 2017, the company cited – as well as contribute towards renewable energy projects, with India frequently cited as one of the world’s most polluted countries. A 2021 report from 451 Research, commissioned by Amazon, concluded that Asia-Pacific organisations could reduce their carbon footprint by more than 78% moving from on-premises data centres to the cloud.

The cloud infrastructure leader had already invested 30,900 crores ($3.7bn) in India between 2016 and 2022.

AWS has two regions in India; Mumbai, launched in 2016, and Hyderabad, launched in November last year. Both fall under the AWS Asia Pacific banner, with 10 regions overall; two in China, India and Japan, and one in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore and South Korea.

Among AWS’ customers in India includes government entities, such as the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and large Indian enterprises, such as commercial vehicle manufacturer Ashok Leyland and Axis Bank.

Puneet Chandok, president of commercial business at AWS India and South Asia, said the investment will help support India on its ‘path to becoming a global digital powerhouse.’ “Since 2016, AWS has invested billions of dollars into cloud infrastructure in India to support the tremendous growth we have witnessed in the use of cloud for digital transformation,” said Chandok in a statement. “AWS is committed to driving positive social and economic impact in India.”

According to the most recent Cloud Readiness Index study published by the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) in 2020, India ranked 10th out of 14 nations, an improvement of two places on the previous analysis in 2018. The report noted that initiatives from MeitY were beginning to take hold in India, from revamping the IT Act to guidelines for government departments on cloud services procurement processes. Yet infrastructure remained the ‘Achilles heel’ in the country, ACCA added.

Photo by Soubhagya Maharana

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