Microsoft opens fourth cloud region in India, expands AI infrastructure footprint

Microsoft on Monday launched its fourth cloud region in India in Hyderabad, strengthening its cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure as demand for data centres and enterprise AI services accelerates across the country.

The new India South Central cloud region in Hyderabad joins Microsoft’s existing cloud regions in Pune, Chennai and Mumbai, giving the technology major its largest hyperscale cloud infrastructure footprint in India.

The expansion is part of Microsoft’s previously announced $20.5 billion investment commitment in the country, which covers cloud and AI infrastructure, skilling initiatives and business operations.

Speaking at the launch, Microsoft India and South Asia President Puneet Chandok said India was at a critical stage of its digital transformation, with the country generating a significant share of the world’s data while having a much smaller proportion of global data centre capacity.

“20 per cent of the world's data is being generated by India, but only 3 per cent of the world's data centre capacity sits in our country,” Chandok said.

He described the gap between data generation and infrastructure capacity as a major opportunity for India over the coming decade.

India currently has around 2 GW of data centre capacity, which Chandok expects to rise to between 12 GW and 14 GW by 2035. He said the expansion would be driven by businesses, government departments and institutions moving from experimenting with AI to deploying AI applications at scale.

Chandok said demand for AI services was already strong, making infrastructure expansion increasingly important to support the next phase of adoption.

“The digital scale that we are building requires physical scale, and that is the national imperative for all of us,” he said.

The Hyderabad cloud region is expected to add to Microsoft’s ability to provide cloud and AI services to organisations in India while strengthening the country’s broader digital infrastructure ecosystem.