Second AWS Region in India provides customers with more options to run workloads with even greater resilience and availability, securely store data in India, and serve end users with even lower latency
Amazon Web Services (AWS), launches 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 organizations, will have greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in India. Customers will have access to advanced AWS technologies to drive innovation including data analytics, security, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI). For more information about AWS Global Infrastructure, visit aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure.
“The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region supports India’s digital transformation and is part of our long-term investment in the country since opening our first office in 2011. Customers and partners in India will now have additional regional infrastructure to deploy applications with greater resilience, availability, and even lower latency,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at Amazon Data Services Inc. “We are proud to invest in the future of the Indian technology community and workforce, and we are committed to helping organizations across industries increase agility and drive innovation.”
“As a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s $1 Trillion Digital Economy vision, the ‘India cloud’ is set for big expansion and innovation. Data centres are an important element of the digital ecosystem. The investments by AWS in expanding their data centres in India is a welcome development and would certainly help catalyze India’s digital economy,” said Shri Rajeev Chandrashekhar, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology and for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. “The Government of India’s upcoming National Cloud and Data Centre Policy envisages a significant increase in India’s capacity from the current 565 MW to over 2565 MW in the near future. We look forward to greener and more sustainable data centres to power India’s expanding economy.”
“We welcome AWS’s commitment to invest approximately INR 36,300 crores in the AWS Region in Hyderabad, which strengthens Telangana’s position as a progressive data center hub in India,” said Shri K. T. Rama Rao, minister for Information Technology (IT), Industries and Commerce, Municipal Administration, and Urban Development at the Government of Telangana. “We recognize the power of cloud computing, which is why we have collaborated with AWS to improve e-governance, healthcare, and municipal operations to benefit the citizens of Telangana. We are pleased that the new AWS Region in Hyderabad will spur more innovation and growth for many enterprises, startups, and public sector organizations in India.”
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 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. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable local customers with data residency preferences to store data securely in India, while providing customers with even lower latency across the country.
AWS is planning to invest an estimated $4.4 billion (approx. INR 36,300 crores) in India by 2030 through the new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, which includes capital expenditures on the construction of data centers, operational expenses related to ongoing utilities and facility costs, and purchases of goods and services from regional businesses. The investment is also estimated to support an average of more than 48,000 full-time jobs annually at external businesses during this time. These jobs will be part of the AWS supply chain in India, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and jobs within the country’s broader economy. The construction and operation of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is also estimated to add approximately $7.6 billion (approx. INR 63,600 crores) to India’s gross domestic product by 2030.
Customers welcome the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region
Hundreds of thousands of customers in India join millions of active customers using AWS in more than 190 countries around the world. Enterprises in India that choose AWS to speed time to market and innovate include Angel One Limited, Ashok Leyland, Axis Bank, Bajaj Capital, Broadridge, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Edelweiss, HDFC Bank, HDFC Life, RBL Bank, Tata Elxsi, and Titan. Indian public sector customers use AWS to lower costs, become more agile, innovate faster, and better serve the citizens of the region. These customers include 21K School, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Common Service Centers, CropIn, Digital India Corporation (MeitY), EnglishHelper, Government of Telangana, Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited, NITI Aayog, PhysicsWallah, Prasar Bharati News Services, TraceX, University of Delhi, upGrad, and Whrrl. Indian startups, including Acko General Insurance, Chingari, epiFi, Fibe, INDMoney, Jupiter, Lendingkart, and Loco, are building their businesses on AWS to scale rapidly and expand around the world.
Acko is considered India’s first built-for-the-cloud general insurance company. “Since our inception in 2016, we have run our entire platform on AWS, which enables us to scale quickly to serve more than 50 million customers seeking seamless insurance experiences,” said Vishwanath Ramarao, chief technology and product officer at Acko. “We are obsessed with making insurance effortless. The launch of the new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable us to run our applications across multiple highly available data centers in India to provide a seamless experience for customers while supporting our growth ambitions.”
Axis Bank, currently India’s third-largest private sector bank, offers an entire spectrum of financial services to customer segments covering large and mid-size corporations, small and medium enterprises, agriculture, and retail businesses. “With AWS as our primary cloud provider, we have successfully migrated more than 70 applications to the cloud, including digital offerings such as virtual debit card and credit card engagement platforms. We plan to migrate 70% of our on-premises workloads to the cloud in the next two years,” said Avinash Raghavendra, president and chief information officer at Axis Bank. “We welcome the launch of the second AWS Region in India, which will enable us to further expand the availability of our banking applications to customers, while ensuring that their data remains onshore.”
PhysicsWallah is an educational platform in India that provides affordable and comprehensive curricula to middle and high school students, and for national degree entrance exams. “We have collaborated with AWS since 2020 and use services such as Amazon CloudFront, AWS Elemental, and Amazon Redshift to seamlessly and securely deliver our live video classes to more than 6 million students across India,” said Prateek Maheshwari, co-founder at PhysicsWallah. “As user engagement across our app, website, and YouTube channel continues to grow across the country, a second AWS Region in India will enable us to continue to scale and provide even lower latency for students accessing our platform.”
Tata Elxsi is a world-leading provider of design and technology services across several industries, including the automotive, broadcast, and healthcare sectors. Part of the Tata Group, Tata Elxsi has over 12,000 designers, engineers, and technologists working in more than 36 offices worldwide. “At Tata Elxsi, we support our customers in reimagining their products and services by applying design thinking and using innovative technologies. Previously, our on-premises infrastructure curtailed our capabilities to deliver high-performing differentiated consumer experiences and services continuously. We embarked on our digitization journey with AWS and migrated several business-critical processes to the cloud, including our own industry-specific software products, platforms, and R&D projects,” said Nitin Pai, chief strategy officer and chief marketing officer at Tata Elxsi. “AWS’s robust cloud infrastructure and affordable services enable us to launch new and innovative solutions, scale based on our clients’ needs, and enable compliance across different jurisdictions. The launch of the second AWS Region in India offers a welcome boost for us to foster greater business resilience.”
India-based AWS Partners also welcome the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region
The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world. AWS Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support to customers. AWS SIs, consulting partners, and ISVs help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customers’ cloud environments. Examples of India-based AWS Partners include Biz2credit, BlazeClan, BluePi, Capillary, Cloud Kinetics, Darwinbox, Dataevolve Solutions, Deloitte, Gupshup, Hostin, Infosys, Manthan, Minfy Technologies, Powerupcloud, Progressive Infotech, Redington, Tata Consultancy Services, Trigyn Technologies, Umbrella Infocare, and Wipro. For the full list of AWS Partners, visit aws.amazon.com/partners.
Built-in-the-cloud systems integrator Minfy is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner headquartered in India with offices in Southeast Asia, United States, and Australia. Since 2016, Minfy has helped more than 320 commercial and public sector customers innovate and digitally transform in the cloud. “Minfy works with many companies, state governments, and large public sector organizations in India, including National Skill Development Corporation, Dalmia Bharat, Exidelife, BookMyShow, MapmyIndia, and Tata Trusts, that build and run their service offerings at scale,” said Vikram Manchanda, CEO at Minfy. “As many of our customers manage highly confidential citizen data, we need to meet strict data security and governance requirements when we migrate their workloads to the cloud. The AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will help us confidently meet these requirements while we deliver highly reliable and available solutions that help customers improve the quality of their service delivery for citizens with our deep tech capabilities in healthcare, life sciences, financial services, energy, and sustainability.”
Commitment to sustainability
As part of The Climate Pledge, Amazon is committed to reaching net-zero carbon across its business by 2040 and is on a path to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of the original 2030 target. Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, and as of the end of 2021, reached 85% renewable energy across its business. In September, Amazon announced its first utility-scale renewable energy projects in India—420 megawatts (MW) of combined capacity across three solar farms located in the state of Rajasthan. Once fully operational, these solar projects will have the combined capacity to generate 1,076,000 megawatt hours of renewable energy per year, enough to power more than 360,000 average-sized households in New Delhi annually (based on the average energy consumption per Indian household of 250 kilowatt hours from Statista). Amazon now has 57 renewable energy projects across Asia Pacific.
