Amazon Web Services to invest $12.7bn in India by 2030

Investment expected to add $23.3bn to Indian GDP by 2030

Since 2017, AWS has taught cloud skills to more than four million people in India. Reuters

Amazon Web Services said it will invest $12.7 billion into cloud infrastructure in India by 2030 to meet growing customer demand for cloud services.

The investment is estimated to contribute $23.3 billion to India’s economy by 2030, the company said.

It followed AWS’s previous investment of $3.7 billion between 2016-2022 and will bring the US company’s total investment in India to $16.4 billion by 2030.

“AWS is committed to driving positive social and economic impact in India. 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 per cent renewable energy goal by 2025,” said Puneet Chandok, president of commercial business at AWS India and South Asia.

“Our planned investment will help create more beneficial ripple effects, supporting India on its path to becoming a global digital powerhouse.”

The planned investment in data centre infrastructure in India will support an estimated 131,700 full-time equivalent jobs in Indian businesses each year. These positions, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and other jobs, are part of the data centre supply chain in India, AWS said.

The company has two data centre infrastructure regions in India – launched in Mumbai in 2016, and in Hyderabad in November last year.

It estimated that its overall contribution to the Indian economy between 2016 and 2022 was more than $4.6 billion, and the investment supported nearly 39,500 full-time equivalent jobs annually in Indian businesses.

“Cloud and the underlying data centre infrastructure are important elements of India's digital infrastructure and ecosystem,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology.

“I welcome the AWS investment … it will certainly catalyse India’s digital economy.”

For businesses, moving to a cloud system hosted by a specialised company – such as Oracle, AWS or SAP – is more economical than creating their own infrastructure of servers, hardware and security networks, industry experts said. It also brings down the overall cost of ownership.

In the cloud industry, businesses pay only for those selective services or resources they use over a period of time.

AWS has seen a rapid uptake in its business in the post-Covid era. Its revenue reached $21.4 billion in the first quarter, rising annually by more than 16 per cent.

Since 2017, AWS has taught cloud skills to more than four million people in India.

In February, it announced an initiative to help unemployed and underemployed IT professionals in India enhance their skills and pivot to mid-level cloud careers.

Indian companies and public sector organisations that migrate computing workloads from on-premises data centres to cloud infrastructure can expect to reduce their energy use – and associated carbon footprint – by nearly 80 per cent, according to 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.