Microsoft has announced a $17.5 billion investment to expand artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing infrastructure in India over the next four years.
This is the group's largest investment in Asia, far exceeding the 3 billion USD announced earlier this year.
The announcement came right after a meeting between CEO Satya Nadella and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where the two sides discussed in depth the AI development roadmap and national growth priorities.
India has long been considered a strategic market in the global AI race. With more than 1.4 billion people, strong digital transformation needs and an explosive business ecosystem, this country has become a leading destination for Google, Amazon and especially Microsoft.
Currently, Microsoft has more than 22,000 employees in 10 major cities in India, but due to the pressure to prove the effectiveness of AI investment, the company continues to expand scale in a more long-term and sustainable direction.
The new investment will be allocated to three key groups: expanding data centers, promoting AI human resource training and enhancing local data storage capabilities.
In particular, Microsoft plans to train 2 million indians in AI technology from now until 2030, contributing to solving the market's thirst for high-quality human resources.
In Hyderabad, the data center includes three available areas with a total area equivalent to two Eden Gardens stadiums, expected to be inaugurated in mid-2026.
In addition, Microsoft will also expand its existing data centers in Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune, while supporting the operation of facilities in Bengaluru, Gurugram and Noida.
Another important highlight is the cooperation between Microsoft and the Federal Ministry of Labor and Employment to integrate AI into the e-Shram platform and the National Employment Service Portal (NCS).
With the support of Azure OpenAI, new services will provide multilingual translations, AI job suggestions, skills trend analysis, labor demand forecasting and automation to create resume preliminaries. This is considered a big step forward to modernize the Indian labor market.
Along with that, Microsoft also announced the sovereign cloud option (Sovereign Cloud), allowing businesses to store data domestically, meeting increasingly strict compliance requirements.
The move comes just months after India issued the 2025 Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Regulations, which give governments the authority to decide on types of data that are not allowed to be transferred abroad.
In the context of the urgency of data localization, Microsoft's "Sovereign Public Cloud" and "Sovereign Private Cloud" solutions are expected to create great attraction for businesses, similar to the independent model that SAP has deployed before.
With this huge investment, India is becoming one of Microsoft's most important AI and cloud centers globally, while opening up new competition in the digital infrastructure sector in Asia.
