India Gets a Second AWS Region • The Register

On Monday, AWS launched a new infrastructure region in Hyderabad with three availability zones, making it the second data center cluster region in India.

“The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region supports India’s digital transformation and is part of our long-term investment in the country since opening our first office in 2011,” said AWS-Veep of Infrastructure Services Prasad Kalyanaraman.

The IT minister in Hyderabad’s home state of Telanganga said the investment of around US$4.4 billion would strengthen the state’s “position as an advanced data center hub in India”. That $4 billion will be spent over the period through 2030, with the figure including DC construction costs, facilities and labor costs, and “purchases of goods and services from regional businesses.”

The Hyderabad region has been a work in progress since the end of 2020. AWS claimed the investment would create over 48,000 full-time jobs annually at external companies in the AWS supply chain — such as construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecom, and more. The company also said construction and operations associated with the region are expected to contribute about $7.6 billion to the subcontinent’s GDP by 2030.

India’s other AWS region opened in Mumbai in June 2016.

The new region brings AWS up to 96 availability zones across 30 geographic regions. Fifteen more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand and Thailand are in the works.

In comparison, Google Cloud has regions in Delhi and Mumbai. Microsoft Azure has regions in Pune and Chennai. A third is coming soon in Hyderabad.

Microsoft is also reportedly monitoring India’s demand for cloud products and sees it as a “massive growth market.”

Microsoft’s Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president of Azure Data, said The economic times Growth comes from developing new cloud-native applications and migrating from legacy storage.

“The percentage of our consumption that comes from many of these new workloads is higher in India,” said Kumar.

Kumar cited a software boom and large companies developing superapps as a strong market segment for Microsoft in India. ®