Microsoft has announced its largest investment in Asia — US$17.5 billion over four years (2026 to 2029) in India — to “advance the country’s cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, skilling and ongoing operations”.
This investment, the tech giant says, builds on a US$3 billion investment announced earlier this year, which the company is on track to spend by the end of 2026.
The new investment will be used to continue to scale Microsoft’s cloud and AI infrastructure, skilling initiatives and ongoing operations across India. This includes a workforce of more than 22,000 employees across a number of cities who drive every part of the product cycle, from model development to engineering and product innovation.
One of the key priorities of the investment, says Microsoft, is building secure, sovereign-ready hyperscale infrastructure to enable AI adoption in India. At the heart of this effort is the significant progress being made at the India South Central cloud region, based in Hyderabad; this is set to go live in mid-2026. It will be the company’s largest hyperscale region in India, comprising three availability zones.
Microsoft will also continue to expand its three existing operational data centre regions in Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune. This expansion, it says, provides organisations across India greater choice and resilience, enabling low-latency, mission-critical performance for enterprises, startups, and public sector institutions.
The country says it is doubling its training and skilling commitment of January 2025. It now aims to equip 20 million Indians with essential AI skills by 2030.
AI investment in India seems to be getting fairly competitive this year. In October we reported that Bharti Airtel and Google had confirmed a strategic partnership deal to invest a combined US$15 billion in Google’s first AI hub and gigawatt-scale data centre in India, with AdaniConneX as an ecosystem partner in the project.
