Amazon Web Services to invest Rs.20,761 crore in Telangana

Telangana State, acknowledged as a trail-blazer on various fronts, cemented its position as a major investment hotspot in the country on Friday when Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced an investment of a mind-boggling Rs 20,761 crore ($2.77 billion) to create multiple data centres in Hyderabad. This is the largest Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) investment in the State yet.

The investment is for setting up an AWS Region with three Availability Zones (AZs) in Hyderabad. The AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is expected to start operations by mid-2022.

“This investment from AWS will be the largest FDI that the State has attracted since its inception and will act as a strong anchor to attract other technology investments,” IT and Industries Minister K T Rama Rao said in his comments on the AWS announcement.

The Minister went on to say that AWS choosing Hyderabad as their preferred destination speaks volumes of the swiftness with which the State government operates as also the transparency in the system. “This investment further strengthens the existing relationship that Telangana enjoys with Amazon. We, in Hyderabad, are already hosting the largest office campus of Amazon,”



he pointed out.

Rama Rao, it may be recalled, had met with AWS officials during his Davos visit earlier this year and subsequently arrived at the closure on the investment in a swift manner.

AZs consist of multiple data centres in distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of one another with independent power, cooling, physical security, and connections via a low-latency network.

The investment from AWS would position Telangana as one of the preferred destinations for other companies that are looking to set up data centres in the future. Establishment of data centres such as AWS is expected to support Telangana’s digital economy and IT sector multi-fold.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organisations to run their applications and serve end-users from data centres located in India. Establishment of data centres in a region will increase the operations of sectors such as e-commerce, public sector, banking and financial services (BFSI), IT, and more, the company said.