Amazon Commits $35 Billion to India, Emphasizing AI

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it will commit more than $35 billion to India’s cloud and artificial‑intelligence ecosystem by 2030. The pledge, made at the Amazon Smbhav Summit in New Delhi, builds on an already‑substantial investment of close to $40 billion in the country.

In a company press release, Amazon said the new capital will be directed toward AI‑driven digitization, export growth, and job creation, aligning with India’s national priorities to develop a sovereign AI capability.

Amazon projects that, by 2030, the investment will generate an additional one million direct, indirect, induced and seasonal jobs, quadruple India’s AI‑related exports to roughly $80 billion, and deliver AI tools to 15 million small and medium‑sized enterprises.

India is emerging as one of the fastest‑growing AI‑spending regions in Asia‑Pacific. “A major gap—and therefore a significant opportunity—lies in the shortage of suitable compute infrastructure for running AI models,” said Deepika Giri, IDC’s regional head of research for big data and AI.

Giri added that Asian countries are accelerating sovereign AI initiatives as trade tensions push the industry toward a more regionalized architecture, with compute infrastructure serving as the cornerstone of these strategies.

Strategic Implications for Amazon

The commitment underscores Amazon’s confidence in India’s digital economy, which has already attracted a network of fulfillment centers, data‑center campuses, and payments infrastructure under the Amazon Web Services (AWS) umbrella. AWS currently holds a 38 percent share of the Indian cloud market, ahead of Microsoft Azure (28 percent) and Google Cloud (16 percent), according to Canalys data from Q4 2023.

Amazon’s move follows a wave of mega‑investments by rivals. Earlier this year, Microsoft disclosed a $17.5 billion plan to expand AI infrastructure across India, while Google announced a series of data‑center projects slated to add thousands of AI‑optimized servers.

Experts see three key drivers behind this escalation:

1. Data‑localization mandates: India’s draft National AI Strategy urges that high‑value AI workloads and training data reside on domestic servers, prompting cloud providers to double‑down on local capacity.
2. Talent pipeline: The country graduates more than 500,000 engineering students annually, fueling a labor market eager for AI‑related roles. Amazon has already launched several AI‑skilling programs in partnership with Indian universities.
3. Export potential: India’s growing software services sector is projected to become a leading exporter of AI models and AI‑enabled applications, especially to emerging markets in Southeast Asia and Africa.

Technology Focus

Amazon’s investment will prioritize the rollout of next‑generation hyperscale infrastructure, including custom ASICs for inference, high‑bandwidth networking (e.g., 400 Gbps Ethernet), and edge‑computing clusters that can support latency‑sensitive AI workloads such as autonomous robotics and real‑time video analytics.

In addition, AWS plans to expand its “SageMaker” suite for Indian developers, offering a localized model zoo, pre‑trained language models for Hindi, Tamil, and other regional languages, and cost‑effective training jobs powered by spot instances.

Economic Impact

Beyond the direct job creation numbers, the ripple effect is expected to stimulate ancillary markets: construction of data‑center campuses, demand for renewable‑energy projects to power them, and a surge in Indian startups focusing on AI‑as‑a‑service (AIaaS). Analysts at BloombergNEF estimate that each megawatt of new data‑center capacity could generate up to 3,000 indirect jobs in the supply chain.

Amazon’s senior vice president for emerging markets, Amit Agarwal, summed up the ambition: “We are humbled to have been part of India’s digital transformation over the past 15 years. Looking ahead, we intend to be a catalyst for growth by democratizing AI for millions of Indians.”

As the race for AI dominance intensifies, Amazon’s $35 billion pledge signals a deepening of the U.S.–India technology partnership and sets the stage for a new era of cloud‑centric innovation in one of the world’s most dynamic economies.