Expansion plan: A truck arrives at Amazon’s warehouse facility in the Staten Island borough of New York. Amazon has announced it will invest an additional US$15bil (RM70.2bil) in India by 2030. — AP
MUMBAI: Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google are committing to ramp up investments in India as the tech giants seek to spur growth in a key market.
The move follows a meeting held by US President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi held with top technology executives, including of Amazon and Google, at the White House last Friday.
Amazon announced it will invest an additional US$15bil (RM70.2bil) in India by 2030. That includes plans by its AWS division to put US$12.7bil (RM59.4bil) into cloud infrastructure in the South Asian nation to meet rising customer demand.
Google will open a global financial-technology centre in Gujarat International Finance Tech-City, more commonly known as GIFT City in Modi’s home state, Alphabet chief executive officer Sundar Pichai said.
“It’ll cement India’s fin-tech leadership,” he said, referring to Indian innovations such as Unified Payments Interface (UPI) that allows people to use their smartphones as a tool for commerce, and Aadhaar.
“We’re going to build on that foundation and take it globally,” Pichai said.
UPI is India’s state-backed peer-to-peer payments solution and several companies including Google use it to offer services in the country. Aadhaar is a biometric ID built by the state for citizens, which is used for payments and various other services.
Google will also bring its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard to more Indian languages, Pichai said.
Google has previously said it is developing an AI model that can handle more than 100 Indian languages across speech and text, a drive that would widen Internet access beyond the country’s urban English-speaking minority.
“Google’s decision to establish its global fintech operations centre in GIFT City is a testament to India’s growing prominence in the fintech landscape,” said Tapan Ray, chief executive officer of GIFT City, “We look forward to hosting Google”
India remains a high priority market for most big US Internet firms such as Meta Platforms Inc, Amazon, Google and Twitter, but one where they’ve all had to face regulatory headaches.
A slew of economic deals were announced during Modi’s visit to the United States, including Micron Technology Inc to invest more than US$800mil (RM3.74bil) toward a US$2.75bil (RM12.9bil) semiconductor assembly and testing facility in India. — Bloomberg
