Why Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are betting billions of dollars on AI use-cases in India

THE YEAR 2025 ended with a big bang as three global technology giants committed billions of dollars to projects that will help them scale up artificial intelligence and monetise it. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft announced a combined investment of nearly $80 billion over the next four to five years. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chairman and CEO, announced a $17.5-billion investment in Asia over the calendar years 2026 to 2029, focussed on India’s cloud and AI infrastructure, skilling, and current operations. This is in addition to the $3-billion investment he announced in January 2025, during his first visit to India that year. At his keynote address in New Delhi in early December, Nadella said, “Sovereignty is a super important topic, and everyone wants to make sure that they can control both the control plane, the data plane and the application tier. And so, we are building multiple options.” More importantly, with Microsoft’s Copilot now at the core of its enterprise adoption strategy for AI, Nadella pointed that from platform level innovation, enabling a seamless experience of Copilot or other agents being able to assist users with tasks, ability to draw inputs from across its offerings, the company’s partner ecosystem is what is now leading the adoption of Copilot at an enterprise level scale. “There is great momentum in this country in terms of these applications getting deployed deeply,” he said. Microsoft also announced partnerships with IT and consulting majors Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro to accelerate the adoption of agentic AI. Each of these companies will deploy 50,000 Microsoft Copilot systems across its enterprise clients to drive productivity gains, workflow efficiencies, coding, and process digitalisation, among other use cases. In India, large companies such as Adani Enterprises, Aditya Birla Capital, and Mahindra, as well as startups such as Kore.ai, Groww, and Meesho, are now building applications, models, and multi-agent frameworks on Azure using AI offerings such as Microsoft Fabric and Foundry Local. At Amazon’s annual Amazon Smbhav Summit in New Delhi, a senior official said that it plans to invest more than $35 billion across all its businesses in India through 2030, on top of the $40 billion it has invested so far. Amit Agarwal, Amazon’s senior vice president and head of emerging markets, said the company will invest in accelerating digital transformation, strengthening infrastructure, and supporting innovation. “We’re excited to continue being a catalyst for India’s growth, as we democratise access to AI for millions of Indians and quadruple cumulative e-commerce exports enabled to $80 billion by 2030. In 2030, Amazon businesses will support 3.8 million direct, indirect, induced and seasonal jobs,” Agarwal said. Ashutosh Sharma, VP and research director at Forrester, a research and advisory firm, says that although big tech has been driving hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment in the U.S., much of that is going towards models. However, those trained models have to be adopted on an enterprise scale to be monetised. “Guess which country is at the forefront of using AI models in the use-cases? India. We see a lot of AI inferencing demand in India, for which companies need to invest in cloud and AI tech domestically,” he says. In October 2025, Google (now Alphabet), the last letter in the acronym FAANG based on the stock names of Meta (earlier Facebook), Amazon, Apple and Netflix, announced its largest-ever investment in India, around $15 billion over the next five years (2026-2030) to build its first AI hub in the country at the port city of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. In December, Alphabet, through its philanthropic arm, Google.org, announced $8 million in funding for four AI Centres of Excellence established by the Government of India in areas such as healthcare. Google will also spend $2 million to establish the new Indic Language Technologies Research Hub at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. D.D. Mishra, VP analyst at Gartner, an IT research and advisory firm, expects cloud, AI, cybersecurity, and analytics segments to show accelerated growth. The broader ecosystem will benefit from improved infrastructure, talent development, and global competitiveness. “This is also strong confidence in the country’s role as a global digital and innovation hub. These investments — spanning cloud, AI, infrastructure, and workforce development — are set to accelerate digital transformation, create new jobs, and boost the competitiveness of Indian businesses and startups,” he says. It is not just the software side, but even on the silicon side. The CEO of chipmaker Intel Corp., Lip-Bu Tan, who was recently in India, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Tata Group. With this collaboration, Intel and Tata intend to explore the manufacturing and packaging of Intel products for local markets at Tata Electronics’ upcoming fabrication unit and OSAT or outsourced semiconductor assembly and test facility. Forrester’s Sharma says India has a mature ecosystem in semiconductor design, and many ATMP (assembly, testing, marking, and packing) units for semiconductors, have come up. “The government is not ignoring foundries so you will see the likes of Intel invest more in that sector,” he says.

Why Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are betting billions of dollars on AI use-cases in India

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