Tech biggies bet big billions on India boosting job prospects with AI, data centre push

Big tech players are writing cheques for billions of dollars as AI and data centres take off.

India's tech landscape received a shot in the arm as tech moguls landed in the national capital to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi committing big billions to his dream of turning the country into a mega hub for technology innovation. From Microsoft to Intel, the bold bet on India's technology ecosystem will help in creation of jobs for millions of youth equipped with engineering degrees that is one of the biggest draw for multinational companies.

On Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met PM Modi which was followed by the tech giant announcing an investment of $17.5 billion in cloud and AI infrastructure spread over a period of four years. This is Microsoft's largest investment in Asia and a vote of confidence for India's tech prowess. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan also met PM Modi and supported India's semiconductor mission. The chip giant has tied up with Tata Electronics to take forward India's semiconductor mission.

Amazon also joined the ranks of big tech players doubling down on its India investments with a commitment of $35 billion to focus on AI, exports and jobs. Amazon plans to create one million additional job opportunities in India. The company has also aimed for cumulative ecommerce exports of $80 billion from India. Search giant Google has also promised big bucks for India with a $15 billion investment that will build a gigawatt-scale data centre/AI hub capacity in Visakhapatnam. OpenAI isn't far behind and is exploring a possibility for data hub in India.

India's data centre boom has attracted not just the big tech giants but real estate players who are banking on these mega hubs for data to grow beyond residential and commercial spaces.

Speaking about its data centre capacity, Microsoft's Satya Nadella said, ""We're thrilled about all the data center capacity that is coming live. We already have stuff in Pune, Chennai and Mumbai. We are very excited about our India South Central cloud region, based in Hyderabad, that's going to come up next year," Nadella said at a Microsoft event here."

The data center boom in India has been driven by the data localization regulation which forces enterprises to store customers' data in India followed by the cloud and AI push. Enterprises, hyperscalers like big tech companies and AI players are driving the demand for these hubs which has seen a spurt recently. The rise in India's per capita data consumption is going to fuel the demand for creation of more data centers in India.

Data centers help create lot of indirect jobs across construction, retail and operations. A lot of construction players have shown interest in building data centres across India. Google's AI and data centre hub in Visakhapatnam is projected to create over 100,000 jobs.

A PwC study for the US found that data centres provide a 6x multiplier of indirect or induced jobs for every direct job they provide.

The big AI data center boom will help create more jobs for engineers, IT experts, construction workers, retail, and across other related industries. A lot of these jobs will come up in the 'grey space' of these AI data centres which are the non-IT backend infra housing generators, UPS, chillers and power distribution gear.

The 'white space' houses high-density racks of GPUs, servers, memory/storage and network gear.

As India readies a trained workforce of engineers and IT experts, the data centre expansion along with India's big chip ambition could serve as one of the big drivers of job creation.