Amazon Web Services (AWS) is betting big on India, with long-term investment and skill training plans, said Puneet Chandok, president of commercial business, AWS India and South Asia. This reflects the company's bullishness on the India opportunity, despite the expected slowdown in its cloud services business globally.
Among AWS' 31 geographic regions worldwide, India stands out as one of the few countries with two locations—Mumbai and Hyderabad. Additionally, the company has announced a new investment of $12.7 billion to construct cloud infrastructure in India by 2030.
“Our India mission is empowering builders and businesses to build a better India. We want to build a customer-obsessed business in India, building relationships which will outlive all of us. We are investing in India for the long-term,” he said speaking at the AWS Summit Mumbai.
“We are investing in India for the next few decades. We were the first one to set up in India in 2011. Then launched our first infrastructure region in Mumbai in 2016, the second was in Hyderabad in 2022,” he added.
AWS launched two of its local zones in Delhi and Kolkata last year. Chandok stated that two more local zones in Chennai and Bangalore are set to be launched by the end of this year.
Bridging the skill gap
Chandok said that based on his conversations with around 100 CEOs in the past four and a half months, the biggest blockage and area of concern for the technology growth in India is the skill gap.
“The country has got the raw materials and produces 200,000 computer science graduates every year, that’s the largest in the world. Around 16% of the global AI talent is coming out of India. But only 12% of the workforce is digitally skilled in India,” he added.
“We need 9X the skill by 2025. In India, since 2017, we have trained 4 million people in digital skills,” he said.
Cost effective generative AI
Among the trends Chandok observed during his customer interactions included need for using data well to extract business insights, practical and cost effective generative AI tools, modernisation of cloud, need for training employees in digital skills and sustainability.
Speaking of generative AI, Chandok said, “When it comes to generative AI, we are going to do something very different from what’s out there. We want to cut through all the noise, and truly democratise AI. We are making generative AI easy to use, practical and cost effective for our customers.”
He highlighted three innovations around generative AI that AWS is working on. These include Amazon Bedrock, Amazon CodeWhisperer and building cost effective infrastructure.
According to Chandok, there’s no one Large Language Model (LLM) that will work with all use cases of generative AI. Bedrock will be the easiest way to build and scale generative AI applications with foundation models.
CodeWhisperer, an AI coding companion for free individual usage, has helped coders complete their tasks 57 percent faster.
“We can truly reimagine every application and productivity tool out there on AI, and you will see a lot of that coming out soon. At AWS, we have been working on AI for 20 years, we know something about this,” he said.
Investment plans
AWS on May 18 announced that it will invest $12.7 billion (over Rs 1 lakh crore) into India's cloud infrastructure by 2030 to meet growing customer demand for cloud services in the country.
The planned investment in data centre infrastructure in India is expected to generate an estimated average of 131,700 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in Indian businesses each year.
These positions, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications and other jobs, are part of the data centre supply chain in India.
With this, AWS’ long-term commitment in the country will reach Rs 1,36,500 crore ($16.4 billion) by 2030. Previously, AWS had also announced an investment of $4.4 billion to build its second data centre cluster in Hyderabad by 2030.
"This investment is estimated to contribute Rs 1,94,700 crore (USD 23.3 billion) to India's total gross domestic product by 2030," the company said in a statement.
During its January-March quarter earnings conference, AWS highlighted that they expect softness in the cloud computing business due to macroeconomic challenges. AWS' quarterly operating income fell 21 percent year-on-year (YoY) from $6.5 billion in Q1 2022 to $5.1 billion.
However, the unit's net sales grew 16 percent YoY from $18.4 billion in Q1 2022 to $21.4 billion in Q1 2023, surpassing analysts' estimates.
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