By Kimberley Kao
Big Tech is doubling down on India, with new pledges from Amazon.com and Microsoft set to pour over $50 billion into the South Asian country.
India has drawn tens of billions of dollars from major technology companies this year, underlining its appeal as an artificial-intelligence and cloud hub.
"India is becoming a hotbed for tech investments and planting the flag pole," said Dan Ives, global head of tech research at Wedbush Securities.
Amazon on Wednesday that it will sink $35 billion across its businesses in India over a five-year period, coming on the heels of Microsoft announcing a $17.5 billion spending plan in the country over the next four years.
"These are big bets on India by Big Tech and speaks to the AI Revolution coming to India over the coming years," Ives added.
Microsoft said on Tuesday that the new investment--focused on developing India's cloud and AI infrastructure--is its biggest yet in Asia.
That piles on to $3 billion the company said it will spend in India earlier this year, and comes after Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi also met with other tech leaders, including the CEOs of Intel and Cognizant.
Intel's chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, said in a post on X that he and Modi had "a wide-ranging discussion on a variety of topics related to technology, computing and the tremendous potential for India," adding that Intel is committed to supporting India's semiconductor mission.
India established the initiative earlier this year with an initial investment of around $10 billion, aiming to reduce dependence on imported chips and establish a self-reliant manufacturing ecosystem.
As AI becomes increasingly important for economic and national security, many governments have grown concerned about being reliant on countries like China and the U.S. for technology. That's spurred a push among several countries in Asia to develop their own AI and chip capacity.
Intel's Tan said the company was looking forward to bolstering India's "silicon and compute ecosystem," after the company announced a strategic alliance with the Tata Group conglomerate focused on chip manufacturing.
Cognizant said on its official X account that Chief Executive Ravi Kumar S and Modi discussed accelerating AI adoption and advancing education and skill development in India.
"Our CEO also reaffirmed to the Prime Minister Cognizant's continued commitment to India and apprised him of our plans to expand into emerging cities," the company said.
Microsoft meanwhile plans to have the largest cloud-computing presence in the country, with a new data center due to come online in mid-2026.
The scale of capital expenditure Microsoft has planned gives it a first?mover advantage in "GPU-rich data centers," Counterpoint Research director Tarun Pathak said, referring to data centers that rely on graphics-processing units.
Amazon said Wednesday that its latest investment will focus on business expansion, artificial-intelligence capabilities, export growth and job creation.
The e-commerce giant had previously said it would invest an additional $15 billion in India by 2030. So far, it has plowed about $40 billion into the country.
Earlier this year, Google outlined a roughly $15 billion investment strategy in India over the next five years, and formed a tie-up with venture capital firm Accel--an early investor in Facebook, Slack and Dropbox--to funnel millions into promising AI startups in the South Asian country.
Hyperscalers--large-scale cloud service providers--are "eyeing the [Indian] market to build scale, de-risk their supply chains and take advantage of the vast talent pool in terms of AI developers," said Pathak at Counterpoint Research. "We expect things to continue evolving rapidly over the next 3-4 years."
Write to Kimberley Kao at kimberley.kao@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
12-10-25 0358ET
