Microsoft chief Satya Nadella, who is currently on an India tour, announced company’s plans to invest $3Bn in the country of the next two years. The investment will span across a variety of domains, most notably across AI skilling, data centres and cloud infrastructure. Nadella made the announcements in India’s tech hub Bengaluru, as a part of ‘Microsoft AI Tour’.
“India is rapidly becoming a leader in AI innovation, unlocking new opportunity across the country. The investments in infrastructure and skilling we are announcing today reaffirm our commitment to making India AI-first, and will help ensure people and organizations across the country benefit broadly”, said Nadella.
Large part of the investment will go towards training 10 million people over the next five years with AI skills, as part of the second edition of the company’s ADVANTA(I)GE India program. In 2024, Microsoft launched the ADVANTA(I)GE India initiative, aiming to train two million people in AI skills by 2025. The company has since surpassed this target ahead of schedule with 2.4 million individuals trained in under a year.
Additionally, Microsoft will expand its cloud and AI infrastructure across datacenter campuses in the country. The Redmond giant already has three datacenter regions in the market, and the fourth ready to go live in 2026. This investment aims to develop a scalable AI computing ecosystem to meet the growing demands of India’s rapidly expanding AI start-ups and research community.
Microsoft Research (MSR) Lab today also announced an AI Innovation Network to deepen its commitment to cultivate the AI ecosystem in India. Under the AI Innovation Network, MSR will build new collaborations, especially with digital natives, to accelerate the transition from research to real, usable business solutions.
MSR India has already initiated a collaboration with Physics Wallah on math reasoning and is in ongoing discussions with other Digital Natives on topics such as causal inference, optimizing Indic LLMs, prompt optimization, and reinforcement learning.
