Amazon to invest ₹1.05 lakh crore in India's cloud infrastructure

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Thursday announced it plans to invest ₹1.05 lakh crore, about $12.7 billion, into cloud infrastructure in India by 2030 to meet growing customer demand for cloud services in India.

The proposed investment in data centre infrastructure in India will support an estimated average of 1.31 lakh full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in Indian businesses each year, the e-commerce giant's cloud unit says in a statement.

These positions, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and other jobs, are part of the data centre supply chain in India.

This investment is estimated to contribute ₹1.94 lakh crore ($23.3 billion) to India's total gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030, it says.

The announcement follows AWS's investment of ₹30,900 crore ($3.7 billion) between 2016 and 2022, which will bring the company's total investment in India to ₹1.36 lakh crore ($16.4 billion) by 2030.

AWS has two data centre infrastructure regions in India – the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, launched in 2016, and the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, launched in November 2022.

The two regions are designed to provide Indian customers with multiple options to run workloads, securely store data in India, and serve end users with low latency, says the Seattle, Washington-headquartered company.

AWS has invested more than ₹30,900 crore in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region between 2016 and 2022. This includes both capital and operating expenditures associated with constructing, maintaining, and operating the data centres in that region.

"PM Narendra Modi ji's Digital India vision is driving expansion of cloud & data centers in India," says Rajeev Chandrashekhar, minister of state for electronics and information technology (MeitY). "India Cloud and the underlying data center infrastructure are important elements of India's digital infrastructure and ecosystem. I welcome the Amazon Web Services (AWS) investment of $12.7 billion to expand their data centers in India. It will certainly catalyse India's digital economy. MeitY is also working on a Cloud & Data Center Policy to catalyse innovation, sustainability, and growth of India Cloud," the minister says.

AWS estimates that its overall contribution to the GDP of India between 2016 and 2022 was more than ₹38,200 crore ($4.6 billion), and the investment supported around 39,500 jobs annually in Indian businesses.

"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," says Puneet Chandok, president of commercial business, AWS India and South Asia.

"In addition to building cloud infrastructure and helping local customers and partners digitally transform, we have trained more than four million people in India with cloud skills since 2017, and invested in six utility-scale renewable energy projects to meet our global 100% renewable energy goal by 2025," Chandok says, adding that the investment will help create more beneficial ripple effects, supporting India on its path to becoming a global digital powerhouse.