Microsoft to pump $3 billion in India-based AI and cloud infrastructure

Microsoft plans to invest over $3 billion in India over two years to boost its AI infrastructure and Azure cloud services, CEO Satya Nadella announced, calling it the company's "single largest expansion" in the country. This comes just days after the Redmond giant announced its plans to invest $80 billion in AI in fiscal 2025.

Nadella is on his India visit and announced the latest investment plans at the Microsoft AI Tour conference in Bengaluru. The tech giant also shared a comprehensive plan to give AI training to over 10 million people by 2030.

This builds on the announcement from early 2024 when Microsoft promised to offer AI training to over 2 million people by 2025. Microsoft surpassed its target by training over 2.4 million people in under a year. It was noted that women comprised about 65% of the participants, whereas 74% of participants came from tier II and tier III cities.

The company also saw a year-on-year increase of 122% in Indian members adding AI skills to their LinkedIn profiles, compared to 71% globally.

Microsoft has already been an early adopter of AI technology. It's a big backer of OpenAI, whose generative AI bot ChatGPT has been making rounds since 2022 (read about the major ChatGPT features from 2024).

Meanwhile, India is becoming a hotspot for technological development with its massive population and cheap internet. For instance, Apple started manufacturing its products in the country. Meta's ambitious $10 billion W-shaped internet cable planned to wrap around the world will have India as one of its touch points. India-specific features have also been added to popular apps and services.

While Microsoft plans to build its fourth datacenter facility in India by 2026, it already has over 300 datacenters spread across 34 countries. Its facilities in Hyderabad and Pune regions employ over 90 people. In a previous report, the company projected that 289 full-time employees and contractors will work across all operational facilities in India by the end of 2026.

Apart from that, Microsoft Research (MSR) Lab announced a new AI Innovation network to boost the AI ecosystem in India and "accelerate the transition from research to real, usable business solutions." MSR is working with the educational technology company Physics Wallah on math reasoning and is in ongoing discussions with other digital natives on topics such as optimizing Indic LLMs, prompt optimization, and reinforcement learning.

Source: Microsoft

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