Microsoft, which has a huge development centre in Hyderabad, is likely to set up a $3-billion data centre in the city. It is reportedly in advanced talks with the Telangana government for establishing the data centre.
Sources say the talks between the two sides have not yet reached the ‘final stages’. It might take 2-3 months before they make a formal announcement. “It will be as big as the investment made by Amazon last year in Hyderabad to build a very large data centre for Amazon Web Services,” said a source in the government. The AWS pegged its investments at ₹20,761 crore to set up an AWS Region with three Availability Zones (AZs) in Hyderabad, its second AWS Region in the country (after Mumbai) and eleventh region in Asia.
Localisation
A growing demand for localisation was stated to be a key reason for the IT and technology major to locate its data centre in Hyderabad.
Telangana was the first State to come out with a dedicated data centre policy. In the policy announced in 2016, the State said it had all the ingredients – reliable power, availability of talent, ideal location and a geography with least seismic activity – to locate dat acentres.
Besides declaring data centres as essential service and excluding them from power cuts, the State government announced exemptions from some key Acts to help the firms ground their projects quickly.