Las Vegas

As India transitions towards becoming a developed economy by 2047, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is strategically adding scale to expand data centres to digitally transform the world’s fastest-growing emerging market.

“AWS is dreaming big and thinking long term for India, and that is reflected in our investments. We have already invested $3.7 billion in India to build our Mumbai region between 2016 to 2022,” said, Pankaj Gupta, Leader Public Sector for AWS India and South Asia.

Highlighting the push that cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) services can offer to India’s efforts of creating a Viksit Bharat by 2047, Gupta cited a 2022 report by the IT industry body, Nasscom, which said that large-scale cloud adoption can add up to $380 billion to the country’s GDP by 2026.

Extensive plans

The cloud services major also has “extensive” plans for India going ahead. “We have announced plans to invest additional $12.7 billion by 2030; and these investments are expected to contribute $23.3 billion in India’s GDP and 131,700 full-time jobs in terms of data centre supply chain. Our total overall outlay by 2030 will be $16.4 billion,” Gupta told businessline.

AWS was the first global cloud services provider to be empanelled by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) in 2017. The company opened its first cloud region (comprising multiple data centres) in India in 2016.

CoWIN

Elaborating on the scale of transformation being achieved in the country via cloud, Gupta said that the CoWIN (Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network) is today the world’s largest Covid vaccination system that has done 2.2 billion vaccinations and 1.2 billion registrations.

CoWIN is also the world’s fastest growing tech platform that did 200 million vaccinations in four months. Now, CoWIN is getting evolved into something called the universal immunisation platform. Government is looking to add in 12 more vaccines such as Diphtheria, BCG, etc. to the same platform again, he addded.

DigiLocker from MeitY, is another “extremely effective” example of the huge scale of transformation being achieved and the critical role played by AWS, Gupta said, adding “Today, DigiLocker has more than 200 million users and 6.5 billion plus documents, and we worked with the government to migrate and modernise this application.”

On the proliferation of cloud services in India, he said “We have early stages of cloud adoption, not just in the public sector, but overall, in enterprises. There is very little portion of the on-premise IT infrastructure that has gone to the cloud. So, there is a huge opportunity.”

Gupta pointed out that the government is taking a lead. Earlier, it used to be that only private enterprises were building these big applications, but today, the government is at the forefront of technology adoption, innovation and transformation.

On growing use of AI and the consequent higher power consumption, he pointed out that AWS is continuously working on energy efficiency strategies.

“If you see some of our announcements as part of re:Invent, it is all about trying to make our data center infrastructure more energy efficient, and one of the new technologies that we announced is trying to leverage liquid cooling for our AI services,” Gupta added.

(The reporter was in Las Vegas at the invitation of AWS.)