Amazon
Source: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States [CC BY]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today, announced its plan to invest $2.77 billion to build a second data center region in India which is expected to launch by mid-2022. The new region will be built in Hyderabad, the capital city of the southern state Telangana.

Amazon, however, did not disclose the amount of its investment in the press release. Instead, it was revealed by K. T. Rama Rao (also known as K.T.R), Minister for Minister of MA&UD, Industries and IT&C of Telangana, in a recent tweet.

The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is going to be second AWS data center region in the country. The first region is located in Mumbai which was started on June 27, 2016.

“The new AWS Asia Region, which will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, will join the existing nine AWS Regions and 26 Availability Zones across Asia in India, Australia, Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore,” wrote Amazon, in its press release.

Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc, which was founded in 2006. The company offers various cloud computing services for both small and large scale operations. Amazon described it as the “world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform.”

The e-commerce giant has been rapidly expanding and upgrading its AWS cloud services across the globe. Recently, it upgraded its GPU Cluster instances by introducing the new P4 cluster. The company offers over 175 fully featured services for computing, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), and more.

AWS has already established itself as the go-to cloud computing service in India. Some of its customers in India include: Ashok Leyland, Aditya Birla Capital, Axis Bank, Bajaj Capital, ClearTax, Dream11, Druva, Edelweiss, Edunext, Extramarks, Freshworks, HDFC Life, Mahindra Electric, Ola, Oyo, Policybazaar, Quantela, RBL Bank, redBus, Sharda University, Swiggy, Tata Sky, YuppTV, Zerodha, and many more.

This new investment brings new opportunities to India. Naturally, it will bring more jobs to the Indian population and also provide solid cloud computing services to both local independent developers and large companies alike. The expansion of the local cloud infrastructure means that Amazon will be able to provide much faster, reliable and powerful services at a higher availability.

The $2.8 billion investment is also going to strengthen Amazon’s already strong foothold in India. In August 2019, Amazon inaugurated its largest campus building globally in Hyderabad. Amazon said that the campus is built to support more than 15,000 employees and reaffirms Amazon’s commitment to India.

“Businesses in India are embracing cloud computing to reduce costs, increase agility, and enable rapid innovation to meet the needs of billions of customers in India and abroad,” said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services. “Together with our AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, we’re providing customers with more flexibility and choice, while allowing them to architect their infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability across geographic locations.”