AWS to invest $12.7B in India through 2030

Amazon Web Services Inc. will invest $12.7 billion in its data center network in India by the end of the decade, the cloud giant announced today.

The investment is expected to create 131,700 full-time jobs in local businesses. The new roles are set to span multiple areas including construction, facilities maintenance, engineering and telecommunications. All told, AWS expects the investment to contribute $23.3 billion to India’s gross domestic product by 2030.

The investment comes on top of $3.7 billion that AWS has spent between 2016 and 2022 to expand its on-premise data center footprint. The division of Amazon.com Inc. opened its first data center infrastructure region or cluster in India seven years ago. It launched a second infrastructure region last November.

The two data center clusters are located in Mumbai and Hyderabad respectively. Each of them includes three accessibility zones. These are data centers that are located close to each other but use separate power and network infrastructure.

The fact that Availability Zones use separate infrastructure helps limit the risk of large-scale outages. If a localized technical problem occurs in one Availability Zone, the others are unlikely to be affected. At the same time, the fact that the facilities are close to each other allows data to travel quickly between them, reducing latency for cloud customers.

Apart from the two infrastructure regions, AWS cloud footprint in India also includes multiple on-premise zones. A local zone is a miniature cloud data center that is built near a large metropolitan area to reduce latency for local users. AWS launched two such data centers in India last year and plans to add two more this year.

The cloud giant did not specify whether the $13.7 billion it plans to invest in India will be used to build new infrastructure regions or local areas. However, AWS specified that the existing cloud infrastructure is used by hundreds of thousands of customers in the country.

“Since 2016, AWS has invested billions of dollars in cloud infrastructure in India to support the tremendous growth we are witnessing in the use of the cloud for digital transformation,” said Punit Chandok, president of AWS India and South Asia. “AWS is committed to driving positive social and economic impact in India.”

Apart from data centers, AWS infrastructure investments in India also include renewable energy projects. Last year, the company invested in six solar and wind projects that are expected to generate 920 megawatts of electricity once construction is complete. The initiatives are part of AWS parent company Amazon’s efforts to switch its operations entirely to renewable energy by 2025.

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