A wave of fresh investments is placing India at the center of global cloud and AI expansion plans. In less than 24 hours, major technology companies committed more than $50 billion to strengthen the country’s digital and AI infrastructure.
Microsoft and Amazon led the push, while Intel also announced plans to manufacture chips in India to tap into rising PC demand and fast AI adoption. The announcements reflect growing confidence in India’s talent base, digital users, and long term market potential.
India is still behind the U.S. and China in building a native AI foundation model and lacks a large domestic AI infrastructure player. However, the country is focusing on its strength in information technology to develop and deploy AI applications at the enterprise level.
“Having a model or computing is not enough for any enterprise to use AI effectively, and it requires companies making application layer and a large talent pool to deploy them,” said S. Krishnan, secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in an interview with a news outlet.
Stanford University ranks India among the top 4 countries globally for AI vibrancy, alongside the U.S., China, and the UK. Developer platform GitHub has also ranked India at the top, with a 24% global share of all projects.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a $17.5 billion investment over 4 years to expand hyperscale infrastructure, embed AI into national platforms, and strengthen workforce readiness.
“This scale of capex gives Microsoft first-mover advantage in GPU-rich data centers while making Azure the preferred platform for India’s AI workloads, as well as deepening alignment with the government’s AI public infrastructure push,” said Tarun Pathak of Counterpoint Research.
Amazon followed with plans to invest over $35 billion, adding to the $40 billion already invested. Other firms like OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have also offered AI tools to millions in India. Google has committed $15 billion to build data center capacity for a new AI hub in southern India.
India’s appeal is also driven by affordable power, growing renewable energy capacity, and ample land for large data centers. Cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune are emerging as new hubs.
“India is a pivotal market and one of the fastest-growing regions for AI spending in Asia Pacific,” said Deepika Giri of International Data Corporation.
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