Interesting article about such investment in India. By American companies.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, was striding across a stage in New Delhi, extolling his company’s $17.5 billion investment in artificial intelligence and the benefits it would bring to his native country’s 1.4 billion people. While he was speaking, Amazon made a rival announcement, promising to throw $35 billion into A.I.-driven projects across India.
A flood of money for data centers, cloud computing and other hardware has come to India. Two months before the near-simultaneous Microsoft-Amazon announcements, Google committed $15 billion to data centers in partnerships with two of India’s biggest conglomerates, the Adani Group and Bharti Airtel.
That $67.5 billion, to be spent over the next five years, is just the crest of a wave. A fourth American tech giant, Meta, is having a plant built near Google’s, as are India’s other biggest industrial houses, Reliance and Tata.
“This is going to be one of the largest single-sector investments that India’s ever seen,” said Somnath Mukherjee, chief investment officer at ASK Wealth Advisors in Mumbai.
These investments are vast in proportion to everything except for other A.I.-related investments.
Trillions of dollars are at stake in this boom worldwide. In India, companies see a market with lots of room to run.
India hosts nearly 20 percent of the world’s data but only 3 percent of its storage. The United States has vastly more data centers than India, but India’s population, already the largest on the planet, is still growing, and its economy is expanding even faster.
“India is the largest consumer of data in the world, but with barely 5 percent of American data capacity,” Mr. Mukherjee said.
The enormous bets on India by Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta underscore the seemingly limitless reaches of the A.I. boom. President Trump stunned India with 50 percent tariffs this summer, casting a pall over the friendly and longstanding economic relationship between the countries. Negotiators from Washington and New Delhi are still trying to find some accommodation on trade. Yet artificial intelligence money plows ahead.