Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft Corp, the world's largest software company, said that the company will invest $1.7 billion in India over the next four years to expand its operations.

The amount is to be deployed across select focus areas in line with Microsoft's strategic vision for India, he said on Wednesday at a press conference in New Delhi.

The fund would also be spent in making India a major hub of Microsoft's research, product and application development, services and technical support for both global and domestic companies.

Earlier in the day, Gates said that the software giant will hire more than 3,000 employees over a period of three to four years in India.

• Bill Gates in India: Complete Coverage

India's highly skilled professionals, low-cost operations, a booming economy, good telecommunications links and a rapidly growing market have made many a foreign companies announce big investments or increase existing investments in the country.

"We depend on India for manpower that is why we are scaling operations here. We have 4,000 people today and we will be 7,000 over the next three to four years. We are hiring as fast as we can," Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said in New Delhi at the CII-CEO Forum.

Gates was emphatically impressed with India's human resource saying, "India has a fantastic pool of software professionals. The world needs to benefit from this. I never thought with so little product companies software services sector will grow so strong as it has grown here."

Only two days ago, Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, too had announced that it will invest over $1 billion in India.

In October, Cisco Systems too said it would invest $1.1 billion in India over the next three years and also triple its staff here. Global banking giant J P Morgan Chase & Co said on Monday that it would employ almost 4,500 graduates in India over the next two years.