Microsoft activates fourth data center region in India as part of $20.5 billion investment

Microsoft’s fourth Azure data center region in India is now live, bringing the tech giant’s total investment commitment in the country’s cloud and AI infrastructure to $20.5 billion. The facility, dubbed India South Central and located in Hyderabad, went operational on August 6, marking one of the largest single-country infrastructure bets by any cloud provider in the region. The new region features three availability zones, which is cloud-speak for physically separated groups of data centers within the same region that keep applications running even if one zone goes down. This addition supplements Microsoft’s existing Azure regions in Chennai, Hyderabad, and Pune, giving the company a geographic spread across southern and western India. The hyperscale capacity boost is designed for workloads that demand serious computational muscle, particularly AI training and inference tasks that Indian enterprises are increasingly adopting. The early access customer list reads like a who’s who of Indian business. Adani Group, Bajaj Finserv, HDFC Bank, and PB Pay are among the first organizations gaining access to the new region. For HDFC Bank, one of India’s largest private sector lenders, loca...