Anant Maheshwari, president, Microsoft India told ET that this would help the company meet the growing demand for public cloud in India which had been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We more than doubled the capacity at our existing facilities in India during the first year of the pandemic and this is directly correlated to the nature of the growth we’ve seen. We’ve taken significant incremental share in the overall new cloud consumption that has happened in the country and therefore have become the number one player in the country,” said Maheshwari.
He expects demand from emerging verticals like edtech, government services, gaming and media and entertainment to drive demand for public cloud solutions in India, in addition to existing ones like banking and financial services, manufacturing, healthtech and retail, among others.
Hyderabad is home to the largest engineering centre and campus for Microsoft globally outside the United States. The new data centre is expected to be its largest in India and will be among the company’s largest data centre investments in India. “I am extremely delighted that Microsoft chose Hyderabad as the destination for its largest data centre investment in India. This will also be one of the largest foreign direct investments (FDIs) the state has attracted,” said KT Rama Rao, Minister Municipal Administration & Urban Development, Industries & Commerce, and Information Technology, Government of Telangana.
According to IDC, Microsoft data centre regions in India contributed $9.8 billion in revenue to the economy between 2016 and 2020. Beyond GDP impact, the IDC report estimated 1.5 million jobs were added to the economy, including 169,000 new skilled IT jobs. The company currently has three datacentre regions in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai.
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“A Microsoft data centre region provides a competitive advantage to our digital economy and is a long-term investment in our country’s potential. The cloud is transforming every industry and sector. The investment in skilling will empower India’s workforce today and into the future,” Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for Skill Development & Entrepreneurship and Electronics & Information Technology of India said.
The new data centre region will further create more jobs and opportunities, said the company. Maheshwari said that the incremental revenue generated by the existing data centres in the last five years for the entire ecosystem would be in the region of about $10 billion. It will offer the entire Microsoft portfolio across the cloud, data solutions, artificial intelligence (AI), productivity tools, and customer relationship management (CRM) with advanced data security, for enterprises, start-ups, developers, education, and government institutions.
