Amazon has said its Web Services division will invest $12.7 billion in cloud infrastructure in India as the company aims to increase the long-term investment in India $16.4 billion by 2030.
The Amazon Web Services investment in data centre infrastructure in India will create about an estimated 130,000 jobs in Indian businesses each year, AWS said in a statement. The new jobs will be spread out in various positions in the data center supply chain in India, like construction, facility maintenance, engineering and telecommunications, the Press Trust of India (PTI) reported.
Ripple Effect
"This investment is estimated to contribute ₹ 1,94,700 crore (USD 23.3 billion) to India's total gross domestic product by 2030," AWS said in the statement. This includes the new investment of $12.7 billion in cloud infrastructure and about $3.7 billion invested between 2016 and 2022.
AWS added that its investment in India has a ripple effect on the local economy in areas such as workforce development, training and skilling opportunities, community engagement and sustainability initiatives.
Amazon has two data centre infrastructure regions in India -- in Mumbai and Hyderabad, which were launched in 2016 and 2022, respectively. "The two AWS Regions are designed to provide Indian customers with multiple options to run workloads with even greater resilience and availability, securely store data in India, and serve end users with low latency," it said, according to PTI.
Digital India
The Indian government said its Digital India vision is driving investment in the country. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India vision is driving (the) expansion of cloud and data centres in India ....MeitY is also working on a Cloud and Data Center Policy to catalyse innovation, sustainability, and growth of India Cloud," Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.
Amazon returned to profit and recorded better than expected profit of $3.2 billion for the first quarter. This return to profits came after reporting a loss of $3.8 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Significantly, Amazon's strong numbers and positive outlook for the next quarter came after the company cut more than 27,000 employees in the last several months in one of the biggest job culls in the industry.
