$70 bn and rising: Amazon's $35 bn bet lifts India's AI tide

Amazon's mega 5-yr plan tops announcements made by Microsoft, Google

- UDISHA SRIVASTAV, AVIK DAS & SHINE JACOB

In 2014, a year after Amazon had commercially launched its on line marketplace business in India, the image of founder and then CEO Jeff Bezos posing in a sherwani hanging out of a truck in Bengaluru, holding a $2 billion cheque to symbolise the Seattle major's mega investment in the country, had gone viral. More than a decade later, on Wednesday, the ecommerce giant announced top dollar investment -$35 billion over a period of five years — with artificial intelligence (AI) being among the biggest priority areas.

In fact, AI and data centres have been a common theme for tech multinationals-most of them from the United States against a challenging geopolitical backdrop. In less than two months, three of the world's largest technology giants - Google, Microsoft and Amazon - have announced a combined investment package of around $70 billion over a period of five years, cementing India as the next go-to-market for AI infrastructure and tools.

As for Amazon, without the props used by Bezos in the initial years, executives from the S-Team (select group of seniors) were in New Delhi for the sixth edition of Smbhav, an annual summit of the company to promote and collaborate with small and medium businesses. This was ground zero for the company's $35 billion commitment-double of what American software giant Microsoft had announced - $17.5 billion-just a day before in New Delhi with AI architecture as the central investment area.