Amazon arm to set up data centre in Hyderabad

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Friday announced setting up of its second data centre region in India in Telangana that will be operational by mid-2022, and will see the tech giant investing about Rs 20,761 crore.

While AWS did not comment on the investment detail, Telangana IT and Industries Minister KT Rama Rao tweeted that AWS will invest Rs 20,761 crore ($2.77 billion) to set up multiple data centres in the state.

"Happy to announce the largest FDI in the history of Telangana! After a series of meetings, AWS has finalized investment of ?20,761 Cr ($ 2.77 Bn) to set up multiple data centers in Telangana. The @AWSCloud Hyd Region is expected to be launched by mid 2022," he tweeted.

Rao, in a statement said AWS is investing to set up an AWS Region with three Availability Zones (AZs) in the state.

AZs consist of multiple data centres in separate distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of one another.

The minister had met officials from AWS during his Davos visit earlier this year and subsequently arrived at the closure on the investment in a swift manner, the statement noted.

In a virtual briefing, AWS said the new 'AWS Asia Region' in Hyderabad will consist of three AZs at launch and join the existing nine AWS Regions and 26 AZs across Asia in India, Australia, Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

"The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organisations to run their applications and serve end users from data centres located in India," Amazon Internet Services president Commercial Business (AWS India and South Asia) Puneet Chandok said.

He added that the expansion will "address the long-term capacity needs in a growth market like India" for the company and enable its customers to architect their infrastructure for greater variability, lower latency, reduce costs and migrate even more critical workloads to AWS cloud.

Globally, AWS has 77 AZs  across 24 infrastructure regions with announced plans to launch 15 more AZs and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland.

This segment is poised for stronger growth in the coming years, driven by data localisation requirements in various sectors including financial services.

AWS competes with global giants like Microsoft and Google in the data infrastructure space.

"Our mission in India is to empower builders and businesses to build a better India...We want to be a force to move India forward, and we're constantly working towards this...we're not here in India for a year or two, but for a long time, we've been building and investing in India for many many years," Chandok said.

He added that organisations around the world and in India are moving to a cloud-based infrastructure to increase agility, access nearly unlimited scalability that cloud brings, improve reliability and security and lower their costs.

"AWS has the largest global infrastructure footprint with 24 regions, 77 availability zones with one or more data centres and 220-plus points of presence...And this footprint is constantly increasing at a significant rate," he said.

AWS had opened its 'Mumbai Region' in June 2016, and in May last year, it expanded its services to include a third AZ there to support rapid customer growth.

The company has expanded its services through edge locations in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Kolkata that work in concert with the Mumbai region.

The launch of the Hyderabad Region will provide AWS customers with lower latency across southern India.

Indian organizations - right from start-ups to enterprises and the public sector will have additional infrastructure to leverage services and advanced technologies, including compute, storage, analytics, artificial intelligence, database, Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning.

AWS customers in India include Ashok Leyland, Aditya Birla Capital, Axis Bank, Bajaj Capital, ClearTax, Dream11, Druva, Edelweiss, Edunext, Extramarks, Freshworks, HDFC Life, Mahindra Electric, Ola, Oyo, Policybazaar, Quantela, RBL Bank, redBus, Sharda University, Swiggy, Tata Sky, YuppTV, Zerodha, and others.

Government agencies, educational institutions, and non-profits including Common Service Centers (CSCs) are using AWS' services.

AWS is also continuing to invest in the upskilling of local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in India through programmes like AWS Academy and AWS Educate.

Photograph: Salvador Rodriguez/Reuters