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

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

In 2014, a year after Amazon had commercially launched its online 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. 

Counting the latest pledge, Amazon’s cumulative investments in India would come to $75 billion by 2030 (including around $40 billion invested since 2010)—making the company the largest foreign investor currently, according to executives. 

Amazon’s top leadership listed AI as among the three pillars for its investment, besides exports and job creation. After Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday, the Redmond-based software giant announced an investment of $17.5 billion between 2026 and 2029 to advance India’s AI and cloud infrastructure, besides skilling and ongoing operations.

 

It comes on top of the $3 billion investment that was earmarked for this year and the next for cloud and AI infrastructure including for setting up data centres. 

In October, Google had announced its plan to set up a 1 gigawatt (GW) AI data centre in the port city of Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, investing $15 billion over the next five years. 

What makes India such an attractive destination for investment, even as AI bubble burst has been a dominating theme globally?        

Prime Minister Modi captured the essence of tech majors investing in India, in a post on X on Tuesday. “When It comes to AI, the world is optimistic about India. The youth of India will harness this opportunity to innovate and leverage the power of AI for a better planet,” Modi wrote. 

Speaking to Business Standard on Wednesday, Russ Grandinetti, Senior Vice President of International Stores at Amazon, said: ‘’India is the most populous country in the world. It's not too far away from a time when it will be the third-largest economy. These things alone would be enough to justify the focus and interest in building our business here because the local market and opportunity are very large.’’ He added that, ‘’at a second level, there are so many things we often build here first, and then bring to other parts of the world. So, India is often a crucible, an idea generator….’’ 

However, some experts and analysts say the three hyperscalers collectively invest billions of dollars every quarter in AI worldwide. Measured against that, the numbers in India may seem modest. However, it also signals the intent of these companies to put India into a small exclusive league of markets where they are prepared to make multi decade, multi-billion dollar bets on AI specific capacity. 

“The timing and sequencing matter as well. That is competitive choreography aimed at securing enterprise trust, regulatory goodwill, and developer loyalty before rivals lock them in,” said Sanchit Gogia, chief analyst, founder and CEO of technology advisory firm Greyhound Research. 

He explained that India’s role in AI is no longer limited to being a user of tools built elsewhere. With the generative AI (GenAI) start up landscape growing multifold in the past year, AI regulation, data governance and data protection rules also make it an attractive testbed. “The result is a market that is both a demand centre and an innovation multiplier. The new investments are about securing long term relevance in that context, not about ticking an expansion box.” 

One cannot ignore the fact that India with its 1.4 billion people, diverse language and the rapid pace of digitisation is a unique country for the large language models created. 

Abhina Johri, a partner at EY, said while the investments are huge, the impact on jobs will be profound and uneven. “High-skilled roles — cloud architects, ML engineers, MLOps specialists, data-governance leads and AI-focused product managers — will grow quickly. At the same time, routine tasks in customer support, logistics and back-office operations will face automation pressure.’’ The real challenge is not job loss but skills mismatch, according to Johri. ‘’India must scale short, job-ready training pathways so that workers can transition into emerging AI-enabled roles.” 

Gartner estimates that India’s information technology (IT) spend is projected to touch $176.3 billion in 2026, rising 10.6 per cent from 2025, propelled by investments in data centres and software.