Ola completes workload shift to in-house Krutrim Cloud after snapping ties with Microsoft Azure

Ola cuts ties with Microsoft Azure, to shift to Krutrim AI for cloud services

Ola group of companies completed the shift of its entire workload to in-house artificial intelligence (AI) firm Krutrim, founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said on May 22, a week after snapping ties with its cloud service provider Microsoft Azure.

"As committed, Azure spend is now 0. All workloads on Krutrim Cloud. Within a week. Will help others also exit and move to our own Indian stack. More than 2500 devs have signed up! Will be working with everyone to get onto our cloud services over coming weeks," Aggarwal wrote on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

He said around 2,500 developers had signed up to try Krutrim Cloud.

On May 11, Aggarwal wrote on X that the firm was cutting ties with Microsoft Azure and would move the entire workload to its AI firm Krutrim within a week.

Azure is a cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft.

The move was triggered after Aggarwal's post on "pronoun illness" was removed by LinkedIn, a job-search portal owned by Microsoft.

"Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big customer of Azure, we’ve decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own Krutrim

cloud within the next week. It is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this," he wrote on X on May 11.

Ola, which has a ride-hailing business and is also the country’s biggest electric scooter maker, has been a Microsoft customer since 2017.

The firm announced its partnership to build a new connected vehicle platform for car manufacturers worldwide back in 2017. Sources told Moneycontrol that ANI Technologies-owned Ola is one of the biggest customers for Microsoft.

Krutrim, which means "artificial" in Sanskrit, is focusing on building the entire AI computing stack. Krutrim will operate as a separate company within the Ola Group, similar to the IPO-bound Ola Electric and its cab business, Aggarwal has said.

In May, Ola unveiled a slew of new software and cloud services by Krutrim. Krutrim launched AI cloud services, called Krutrim Cloud, to help developers and enterprises access advanced GPU resources to accelerate their projects and improve productivity.

As part of this offering, the company said it would offer access to "state-of-the-art" GPU hardware that provides superior performance for intensive computing tasks like AI training, 3D rendering, and scientific simulations.

Krutrim was unveiled in December 2023 and it became the country's first AI unicorn earlier this year after disclosing a $50 million financing at a $1 billion valuation.

The funding round was led by Matrix Partners India, an early backer of Aggarwal's other ventures Ola Cabs and Ola Electric.