Ola Group of Companies' founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on May 11 said that the firm is cutting ties with its existing cloud service provider, Microsoft Azure, and will move its entire workload to the firm's own AI firm Krutrim.
The move comes days 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 (formerly Twitter).
Sources told Moneycontrol that ANI Technologies-owned Ola is one of the biggest consumers for Microsoft and cutting ties would mean loss of more than Rs 100 crores of business.
Ola has been Microsoft's consumer since 2017. The firm announced its partnership to build a new connected vehicle platform for car manufacturers worldwide back in 2017.
On May 6, Aggarwal had taken to X to offer his thoughts on gender pronouns. He had asked LinkedIn's AI bot about himself and shared a screenshot of the reply, in which the chatbot had used "they" and "their" to address the CEO.
His thoughts parked a debate on the microblogging platform. In his post, he said that the “pronoun illness” does not reach India and urged people to draw a line in following “the west blindly”.
However, the post was eventually taken down by LinkedIn citing violations of community guidelines.
On May 9, Bhavish Aggarwal criticised social networking platform LinkedIn after they removed his post on pronoun illness and claimed that their artificial intelligence (AI) tool was "imposing a political ideology on Indian users that’s unsafe, sinister".
Writing on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday, Aggarwal said that it was "rich of" LinkedIn to call his post unsafe and emphasised the need to develop own tech and AI in India.
Recently, Ola unveiled a slew of new software and cloud services by Krutrim.
Krutrim, which means "artificial" in Sanskrit, is focusing on building the entire AI computing stack. Aggarwal had said that it will operate as a separate company within the Ola Group, similar to the IPO-bound Ola Electric and its cab business.
Krutrim launched AI cloud services, called Krutrim Cloud, to help developers and enterprises access advanced GPU resources to accelerate their projects and improve productivity later today.
As part of this offering, Krutrim will 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.
"Any other developer who wants to move out of Azure, we will offer a full year of free cloud usage. As long as you don’t go back to Azure after that! Mail us on exitazure@olakrutrim.com. Offer is perpetually open," Aggarwal wrote on X.
Discover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated!
