Microsoft unveils fourth data centre in India

MicrosoftCorp unveiled itsfourthdatacentre inIndiaon Monday, betting on rising digital consumption in one of its fastest-growing markets.

MicrosoftIndiahead Anant Maheshwari said the company was making long-term investments in the country, although he declined to confirm reports by local media of a $2 billion price tag for the latest centre.

"A public clouddatacenteris not a one time investment, it is a continuous investment that we have," Maheshwari told Reuters. "In the last two years, we doubled the capacity in the existing threedatacenters."

The overallIndian public cloud services market is expected to reach $10.8 billion by 2025, according to research firm IDC.

India's government has been nudging foreign tech companies to store more of theirdatalocally, a move seen as New Delhi's attempt to gain stricter oversight of Big Tech firms.

Maheshwari saidMicrosoftwas continuing to grow its workforce inIndiafrom 18,000 currently "both through the pandemic and going forward."

"We already serve more than 340,000 companies in the country," Maheshwari said.

The newdatacentre is located inIndia's southern state of Telangana.

The company's business model, which relies on partners building additional services on top of its cloud platform, Azure, generated business worth about $10 billion in the last five years, Maheshwari said.

Competitors are joining the race inIndia. Key rival Amazon announced in late 2020 it would spend $2.8 billion to build its seconddatacentre in the country, while Adani Group last year announced plans to build sixdatacentre parks across the country.