AWS to invest $4.4 bn in Hyderabad data centre

Amazon Web Service (AWS) on Tuesday announced an investment of USD 4.4 billion (about Rs 36,300 crore) by 2030 in building in Hyderabad its second data center cluster in India.

Amazon.com Inc company, through the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region, will provide developers, startups, and companies among others to "run workloads with greater resilience and availability, securely store data in India, and serve end users with lower latency." AWS already has a similar facility in Mumbai, which opened in 2016. It runs such facilities in 30 geographies in the world. The need for data centres in India has shot up exponentially with the rise in data consumption and cloud adoption.

"The construction and operation of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region is also estimated to add approximately USD 7.6 billion (Rs 63,600 crore) to India's gross domestic product by 2030." K T Rama Rao, Minister for IT and Industries, Government of Telangana, welcomed AWS' commitment to invest Rs 36,300 crore in the AWS region in Hyderabad, which strengthens the state's position as a progressive data centre hub in India.

Rating agency Crisil estimates that data centre capacity to double to reach 1,700-1,800 MW by 2025 from the current capacity of 870 MW. This has prompted conglomerates such as Adani Group to announce big investments in setting up data centres at multiple locations. While Oracle, in 2019, announced Gen 2 cloud regions in Mumbai and Hyderabad, and Reliance Industries has tied up with Microsoft to provide cloud services to small and medium enterprises in the country. Hiranandani Group launched Yotta Infrastructure to build data centres in Mumbai and Chennai.

In a statement, AWS announced "the launch of its second AWS infrastructure region in India - the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region. Starting today, developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organisations, will have greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centres located in India. Customers will have access to advanced AWS technologies to drive innovation, including data analytics, security, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI)," it said.

The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region supports India's digital transformation and is part of AWS' long-term investment in the country since the opening of its first office in 2011, said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice-president of Infrastructure Services at Amazon Data Services Inc. "Customers and partners in India will now have the additional regional infrastructure to deploy applications with greater resilience, availability, and even lower latency," he said.

With the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region, AWS now has 96 Availability zones across 30 geographic regions, with announced plans to launch 15 more Availability zones and five more AWS regions in Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand. AWS regions are composed of Availability zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region consists of three Availability zones and joins the existing AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region, which was opened in June 2016. Availability zones are located far enough from each other to support customers' business continuity, and near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability zones. Each Availability zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks.