Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a significant $17.5 billion investment in India over four years, focusing on AI and cloud. He acknowledged India’s need for sovereign control and local resilience in technology deployment. Nadella lauded India’s unique “virtuous cycle” of policies, digital infrastructure, and market, highlighting the launch of Sovereign Public Cloud for enhanced governance and control.
NEW DELHI; As Microsoft invests $17.5 billion in India over the next four years into AI and cloud, the tech giant’s CEO Satya Nadella Wednesday said it was a “legitimate concern” of countries like India to talk about sovereign control and local resilience.Asked whether AI and tech prowess were increasingly being used as diplomacy tools and nations needed to build resilience and sovereign stack, Nadella said, “… it’s absolutely a very legitimate question and concern… and I would say a requirement. Which is for a country like India to say that ultimately things that are being deployed here, used here, at scale are effectively resilient and sovereign. In other words, you want to control your own destiny.”Reaffirming the tech giant’s commitment to India’s AI ambitions, the India-born CEO – delivering his keynote at the Microsoft Leadership Connection event – praised what he called a “virtuous cycle” created by the country’s tech policies, digital public infrastructure, and vast domestic market. “One thing India has done very uniquely is bring together a virtuous cycle from the policies, the programmes, the technology stack, and the market,” he said. “It’s tremendous to see the private sector fully participate, whether in payments, healthcare, or insurance. It’s not about any one thing. That entire stack is magic.”He added that with the Sovereign Public Cloud now available in India, organisations could tap into a prescriptive architecture for deploying workloads on Azure, supported by built-in compliance guardrails through Sovereign Landing Zones. This, he said, enabled policy enforcement and provided stronger governance controls.On the company’s India investment strategy, he said he was excited about the data centre capacity it was setting up, adding he had discussed the plans with PM Narendra Modi on Tuesday. “We’re thrilled about all the data ce-ntre capacity that is coming live. We already have stuff in Pune, Chennai and Mumbai. We are very excited about our India South Central cloud region, based in Hyderabad, that’s going to come up next year,” Nadella said.
