Amazon To Spend $2.8B On Data Centers In India
Amazon is dropping some serious coin to expand its data center footprint in India.
AWS, Amazon’s cloud services division, plans to invest $2.8B in a cluster of new data centers in the southern Indian state of Telangana. The news was announced by K.T. Rama Rao, the state’s information technology minister, on Twitter. Rama Rao said it was the largest-ever direct foreign investment in Telangana.
The new data center region will be in Hyderabad and is slated to launch by mid-2022.
AWS opened its first Indian data center cluster in Mumbai in 2016, and earlier this year sought environmental clearance for the construction of two data centers in Hyderabad, according to the New Indian Express.
India is home to a large and fast-growing market for cloud services, as well as an important strategic market for Amazon and other tech giants. The public cloud market in India is expected to grow to $8B by 2023, according to Boston Consulting Group, with streaming media, gaming and other data-intensive activities driving much of the growth.
Amazon has been on a global data center development blitz to shore up capacity for AWS, its most profitable business unit. AWS generated $35B in revenue in 2019.
Last week, officials in Loudoun County, Virginia, approved a 1.75M SF data center project on a 100-acre site near Dulles International Airport. AWS already operates more than 50 data center sites in Loudoun County, which is home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world.
The company plans to build a large new data center at a 109.6K SF facility in San Antonio, according to the San Antonio Express-News.
Earlier this year, AWS paid $101.4M for a 358K SF building that was slated to become a new data center, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported at the time.
Amazon has been one of the biggest spenders on data center capacity in recent years. AWS and other public cloud providers, which include Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, accounted for 37% of data center spending in 2019, according to Synergy Research Group.
