Newsletter
Microsoft has committed $17.5 billion investment in India between 2026–2029.
FYI, its largest bet in Asia to supercharge cloud infrastructure, AI capabilities, and skilling initiatives.
What’s happening: this builds on its earlier $3B commitment, which it expects to fully deploy by 2026.
“Together, Microsoft and India are poised to set new benchmarks and drive the country’s leap from digital public infrastructure to AI public infrastructure in the coming decade,” the company said in the blog.
Here is all Microsoft is bringing with this investment -
- New hyperscale region in Hyderabad going live in mid-2026
- Expansion of existing data centers in Chennai, Hyderabad, and Pune
- Focus on sovereign, secure, India-controlled cloud systems
- AI upgrades for e-Shram & National Career Service
- Multilingual access, job matching, predictive analytics, auto-resumé tools
- Goal doubled to train 20 million Indians by 2030
- Launch of Sovereign Public & Private Cloud offerings
- Microsoft 365 Local and Copilot to process data within India by end-2025
Why it matters: with Microsoft 365 and Copilot shifting to in-country data processing by 2025, India reduces its dependence on foreign data jurisdictions which is a major priority as the country rolls out the Digital Personal Data Protection Act.
India today is the world’s fastest-growing cloud market, expected to touch $17.8 billion by 2027 (IDC), but capacity is still concentrated in a few cities and demand regularly outpaces supply.
Microsoft’s investment adds new hyperscale zones, expands existing ones, and brings sovereign-ready cloud systems all of which reduce latency, strengthen data security, and give the country the muscle to run population-scale digital platforms at home.
By upgrading e-Shram and NCS using Azure OpenAI, Microsoft will bring AI tools to 310 million informal workers, one of the largest employment ecosystems in the world.
