Microsoft plans to invest $3 billion in cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and skilling over the next two years, chief executive Satya Nadella announced on January 7.
The investment will include setting up new datacenters in the country. The company currently has three datacenter regions in India with the fourth region expected to go live in 2026.
Nadella also announced an increased commitment to AI skilling in the country, with plans to train 10 million people in AI skills over the next five years as part of the second edition of Microsoft's ADVANTA(I)GE India programme.
This initiative is part of Microsoft’s Global Skills for Social Impact charter, and these trainings will be delivered in partnership with the government, nonprofit and corporate organizations, and communities.
Microsoft said it has already trained 2.4 million individuals in AI skills through this programme in under a year, surpassing its target of two million people announced in 2024. 65 percent of the participants were women, and 74 percent came from tier II and tier III cities.
The Microsoft chief made these announcements at the Bengaluru leg of Microsoft AI Tour and comes as part of the tech giant's efforts to help India become an AI-first nation.
"India is rapidly becoming a leader in AI innovation, unlocking new opportunity across the country. The investments in infrastructure and skilling we are announcing today reaffirm our commitment to making India AI-first, and will help ensure people and organisations across the country benefit broadly" Nadella said.
Puneet Chandok, president, Microsoft India and South Asia, also mentioned that today's announcements strengthen the company's belief in India's potential and commitment to equip the country with the resources and future-ready skills essential in the global marketplace.
"We will continue to use AI to unlock possibilities for the next few decades and ensure communities across the country have access to the compute they need to prosper in the AI era," he said.
AI MoU with SaaSBoomi
Microsoft also announced an AI memorandum of understanding (MoU) with SaaSBoomi, a community for business-to-business(B2B) startups in India.
As part of this collaboration, Microsoft and SaaSBoomi aims to upskill more than 150,000 startup employees through focused workshops, help attract an additional $1.5 billion in venture capital funding for the Indian AI and SaaS ecosystem, and create over 200,000 new job opportunities over the next five years.
Under the MoU, Microsoft will support the emergence of more than 50 unicorns and soonicorns, it said.
Other announcements include the AI Innovation Network, an initiative aimed at accelerating the transition from research to practical, usable business solutions.
Under this programme, Microsoft Research (MSR) Lab aims to establish new collaborations, especially with digitally native businesses in the country, it said.
MSR India said it has started a collaboration with Physics Wallah on math reasoning and is in ongoing discussions with other companies on topics such as causal inference, optimizing Indic LLMs, prompt optimization, and reinforcement learning.
These companies will gain access to MSR’s research and expertise, while MSR will have the opportunity to deploy its research technologies at scale in partnership with these companies, the firm stated.
"Our collaboration with Microsoft Research is a step towards creating tools that understand and support each student’s learning journey. By combining our expertise with Microsoft’s advancements in AI and Large Language Models, we’re working to make education more accessible, personalized, and impactful" said Physics Wallah co-founder Prateek Maheshwari.
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