Microsoft has begun work on its largest and fourth data centre in India, in Hyderabad. The US-based company will invest about ₹15,000 crore over the next 15 years to build the data centre. The first phase of the data centre is expected to be ready in 24 months.

With the country putting in data location regulations and demand for cloud growing, Microsoft has increased its data centre presence in India from 2015 by setting up three data centre regions (Mumbai, Pune and Chennai). It has a network of 160 data centres — organised into 60 data centre regions — across the world.

“It will offer the entire Microsoft portfolio across cloud, data solutions, artificial intelligence (AI), productivity tools, customer relationship management (CRM) and other solutions,” said Anant Maheshwari, President of Microsoft India. Maheshwari was addressing a press conference after announcing the company’s intent to set up the data centre.

He, however, refused to divulge the exact location and number of employees that would be hired for the data centre.

Quoting a commissioned survey by IDC, he claimed that Microsoft’s data centre regions in India contributed $9.5 billion revenue and over 1.5 million jobs to the economy between 2016 and 2020.

Telangana IT and Industries Minister KT Rama Rao has said that the US firm would invest ₹15,000 crore in the data centre, making it the second largest foreign direct investment after Amazon Web Service, which announced an investment of ₹20,000 crore in the same business.

Target for 700 days

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, said at the same event that the Narendra Modi government has set a few goals for itself in the next 700 days.

This includes connecting Indians with a secure technology backbone.

“As of now, 80 crore people are online. This is expected to be 120 crore in the next two years. This will be possible because of the roll out of the final phase of Bharat Net and 5G services,” he said.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW