①This week, Intel , Microsoft and Amazon Tech giants have announced plans to increase investment in India to develop data centers . and artificial intelligence ② India possesses abundant resources for data center construction, a large talent pool, a digital user base, and market potential, making it a hot investment destination for tech giants; ③ Indian officials have pointed out that India's opportunity may lie in developing artificial intelligence applications.
Following Microsoft's announcement on Tuesday of a $17.5 billion investment, Amazon quickly followed suit on Wednesday, pledging to invest $35 billion in India by 2030. Intel also announced on Monday that it will manufacture chips in India.
These flurry of news reports have brought India into the global spotlight of the technology industry. Tech giants are investing heavily in India to leverage its abundant data center construction resources, vast talent pool and digital user base, and enormous market potential.
While India lags behind the US and China in developing indigenous AI foundational models and lacks large-scale domestic data centers, its expertise in information technology helps in creating and deploying AI applications at the enterprise level, which also presents significant opportunities for large technology companies.
S. Krishnan, Secretary of the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, stated that having models or computing power is not enough for businesses to effectively use artificial intelligence; they also need to develop applications and have a large talent pool to deploy them.
He pointed out that India's opportunities lie more in developing applications to drive revenue growth for artificial intelligence companies.
India's advantagesIn the past few months, artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have increased their presence in the Indian market. In October, Google further finalized its plan to invest $15 billion to build a new AI data center in southern India.
Compared to more mature markets like Singapore and Japan, India possesses ample land resources for deploying large data centers, while its electricity costs are relatively lower than in Europe. Furthermore, India's growing renewable energy capacity will provide sufficient energy for these data centers.
International Data Corporation (IDC) Big Data Deepika Giri, Vice President and Head of AI Research, stated that India is a key market and one of the fastest-growing markets for AI spending in the Asia-Pacific region.
Microsoft , which announced a $17.5 billion investment over four years to build large-scale infrastructure, is likely to become a leading player.
Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research, pointed out that this scale of capital expenditure will give Microsoft a first-mover advantage in GPU-intensive data centers, while making Microsoft Azure the platform of choice for AI workloads in India.
(Article source: CLS)
