Amazon Web Services to invest Rs 20,761 crore in data centres in Telangana

Amazon Web Services to invest Rs 20,761 crore in data centres in Telangana
Telangana State acknowledged as a trail-blazer on various fronts, cemented its position as a major investment hotspot in the country on Friday when Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced an investment of a mind-boggling Rs 20,761 crore ($2.77 billion) to create multiple data centres in Hyderabad. This is the largest Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) investment in the State yet.

The investment is for setting up an AWS Region with three Availability Zones (AZs) in Hyderabad. The AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is expected to start operations by mid-2022.

“This investment from AWS will be the largest FDI that the State has attracted since its inception and will act as a strong anchor to attract other technology investments,” IT and Industries Minister KT Rama Rao said in his comments on the AWS announcement.

The Minister went on to say that AWS choosing Hyderabad as their preferred destination speaks volumes of the swiftness with which the State government operates as also the transparency in the system. “This investment further strengthens the existing relationship that Telangana enjoys with Amazon. We, in Hyderabad, are already hosting the largest office campus of Amazon,” he pointed out.

Rama Rao, it may be recalled, had met with AWS officials during his Davos visit earlier this year and subsequently arrived at the closure on the investment in a swift manner.

AZs consist of multiple data centres in distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of one another with independent power, cooling, physical security, and connections via a low-latency network.

The investment from AWS would position Telangana as one of the preferred destinations for other companies that are looking to set up data centres in the future. The establishment of data centres such as AWS is expected to support Telangana’s digital economy and IT sector multi-fold.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organisations to run their applications and serve end-users from data centres located in India. The establishment of data centres in a region will increase the operations of sectors such as e-commerce, public sector, banking and financial services (BFSI), IT, and more, the company said.

Advantage Telangana
Highlighting why AWS chose Telangana, Puneet Chandok, president-Commercial Business, Amazon Internet Services, AWS India and South Asia said, “Telangana is one of the most progressive States with policies targeted specifically towards advancing the growth of IT and IT-enabled services (ITES) companies in India.”

“Hyderabad is a city that recorded the highest growth rate in the IT sector over the years and is home to many innovative startups, enterprises, and a skilled workforce. AWS chose Hyderabad because of the support provided by the government of Telangana, robust policy framework, and because it best met the rigorous requirements for an AWS Region,” he added.

“Together with our AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, we are providing customers with more flexibility and choice, while allowing them to architect their infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability across geographic locations,” added Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services.

Pooling capabilities
The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will provide customers with even lower latency across southern India. The new Region, which will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, will join the existing nine AWS Regions and 26 Availability Zones across Asia in India, Australia, Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

Globally, AWS has 77 Availability Zones across 24 infrastructure regions, with announced plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland.

Source: https://telanganatoday.com/amazon-web-services-to-invest-rs-20761-crore-in-data-centres-in-telangana