Tech giants spend big on India data centres

Megacities in southern India are attracting enormous investments to help build artificial intelligence infrastructure to serve the world's most data-hungry country, write Alex Travelli and Pragati K.B. from New Delhi

- 

Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, was striding across a stage in New Delhi, extolling his company's $17.5 billion investment in artificial intelligence and the benefits it would bring to his native country's 1.4 billion people. While he was speaking, Amazon made a rival announcement, promising to throw $35 billion into Al-driven projects across India.

A flood of money for data centres, cloud computing and other hardware has come to India. Two months before the near-simultaneous Microsoft-Amazon announcements, Google committed $15 billion to data centres in partnerships with two of India's biggest conglomerates, the Adani Group and Bharti Airtel.

That $67.5 billion, to be spent over the next five years, is just the crest of a wave. A fourth American tech giant, Meta, is having a plant built near Google's, as are India's other biggest industrial houses, Reliance and Tata.

"This is going to be one of the largest single-sector investments that India's ever seen," said Somnath Mukherjee, chief investment officer at ASK Wealth Advisors in Mumbai, India.

These investments are vast in proportion to everything except for other AI-related investments. Trillions of dollars are at stake in this boom worldwide. In India, companies see a market with lots of room to run.