Amazon Web Services (AWS) seeks to meet growing customer demand for cloud services in India by infusing $12.7 billion into the country’s cloud infrastructure market by the end of the current decade.
AWS executives made the announcement at its recent AWS Summit in Mumbai held last May 18th.
Slated to be paid in full by 2030, the said investment will go into India’s data center infrastructure, offering support for over 130,000 full-time jobs across a wide range of industries within the country.
Since 2016, AWS has already invested the equivalent of $3.7 billion into the Indian cloud sector.
Together with the infrastructure, AWS also hopes its investment will go into cloud skills training for over four million Indian IT professionals, as well as into sustainable energy initiatives in light of the country’s notoriety as one of the most polluted nations in the world.
This last point stems from a 2021 report commissioned by Amazon which showed that organizations within the Asia-Pacific region stand to reduce their carbon footprints by as much as 78% just by shifting from on-site data centers to the cloud.
Based on the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA)’s 2020 Cloud Readiness Index, India remains on the low end of the readiness scale despite gaining two places to rank tenth out of fourteen since 2018.
The index nevertheless pointed out that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has implemented a number of measures to alleviate the situation, including revamped cloud services procurement guidelines under the country’s IT Act for government offices. Unfortunately, infrastructure remains the weak link in India’s drive towards cloud readiness.
AWS established its Mumbai region back in 2016 and the one in Hyderabad just last November. Both are under the company’s Asia-Pacific division which also includes regions in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, and South Korea. In India, its customers include several government entities, along with major enterprises like Axis Bank and vehiclemaker Ashok Leyland.
