Underlining the growing interest on the part of US technology companies in India, Amazon, through Amazon Web Services (AWS), reportedly has plans to invest an estimated $2.8 billion in the city of Hyderabad, Telangana State, India, to set up a new cloud region – or AWS Region, as it is known.
The new AWS Region will consist of three so-called Availability Zones joining the company’s existing nine AWS Regions and 26 Availability Zones across Asia.
The AWS concept of a Region refers to a physical location around the world where the company clusters data centres. AWS calls each group of logical data centres an Availability Zone.
Globally, AWS has 77 Availability Zones across 24 infrastructure regions, with plans to launch 15 Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. The new cloud region in Hyderabad will be launched by mid-2022.
According to Indian press reports, Amazon has been investing in the country for some time. This year, the company announced it was spending $1.6 billion on two data centres in India. One will occupy 66,000 square metres; the other is to measure 82,000 square metres. Both will be in the Ranga Reddy district in the state of Telangana.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has already visited India as part of a marketing campaign, announcing plans to invest $1 billion to digitise small and medium businesses across India.
But this isn’t just about Amazon. Earlier this year, Google and Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced the Google for India Digitization Fund, worth $10 billion. Google already has two data centre regions in India.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has three data centre regions in India, and last year announced plans to partner Reliance Jio to build Azure data centres across the country.
