India is an “incredibly energised, high-growth market,” according to Adam Selipsky, chief executive officer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the $80-billion cloud computing arm of online retail giant Amazon. The Seattle-based company will invest about $12.7 billion to expand its business in India till 2030, he told ET’s Romita Majumdar and Surabhi Agarwal in a virtual interview. The 56-year-old took charge of AWS in March 2021 after the then CEO Andy Jassy succeeded Jeff Bezos as the CEO and president of Amazon. Noting the rising prevalence of local storage of digital data, he pointed to AWS’ plans to take on Microsoft’s ChatGPT as well as Google’s Bard with its own generative AI platform. Edited excerpts.
What are AWS’ expansion plans for India?
We've already invested $3.7 billion in India between 2016 and 2022. A lot of that was in our first big infrastructure region in Mumbai. We now plan to invest an additional $12.7 billion in our local cloud infrastructure in India till 2030. And so that cumulatively is $16.4 billion and we’re very pleased and excited by that. It will add over $23 billion to the India’s gross domestic product by 2030. That’s substantial and we’re really excited.
A lot of that investment will be in our new Hyderabad infrastructure region that we launched last year as well as for growing the Mumbai infrastructure region that was launched in 2016.
Is the Indian market looking like a bright spot when Europe and US markets are slowing?
India has absolutely remained an incredibly energised, high-growth market. We see digital innovation proceeding really rapidly in India. I was just incredibly impressed by the amount of activity I saw when I was there (in April). I think it’s exciting times for India’s economy. I know the government has played a role in setting a lot of those wheels in motion. They’re trying to build a trillion-dollar digital economy by 2025, on the way to becoming a $5 trillion economy over the next few years. And embracing cloud technology is critical for India to realise those ambitions.
Worldwide, only a small minority of IT spend has moved to the cloud. And that includes India, we’re still at the beginning in the early stages of adoption amongst enterprises and public sector customers. And you look at economic downturns of the past and companies in the 2008 time frame like Uber and Airbnb, who got going building on AWS in those time frames — those are the worldwide leaders now and I expect more of this to come out of this economic crisis. And I suspect a lot of that will come from India.
Read more at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/epaper/delhicapital/2023/may/18/et-front/aws-to-invest-12-7-billion-in-india-till-2030/articleshow/100313529.cms
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