Amazon's $2.8bn Plan: India Gets Its Second AWS Cloud Computing Region

Amazon's cloud business, Amazon Web Services, has announced plans to build a second AWS region in India and will reportedly spend $2.8bn on building out the infrastructure. 

The new region will be located in the state of Telangana in the Hyderabad tech hub and becomes part of AWS's Asia Pacific cloud. It joins the AWS region in Mumbai, which launched in mid-2016 and has three availability zones. 

"As the capital and the largest city in Telangana, Hyderabad is already an important talent hub for IT professionals and entrepreneurs," said AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr.

"This upcoming infrastructure region in Hyderabad is the latest in a long series of investments that we continue to make in India."

The Hyderabad region is expected to come online in mid-2022, bringing AWS's total global regions up to 29 if both operational and in-progress regions are included. AWS currently has 77 availability zones across 24 regions today.   

As spotted by TechCrunch, the government of Telangana's technology minister, K T Rama Rao, tweeted today that AWS will spend $2.77bn to set up several data centers in Telangana.  

Hyderabad is already home to a massive Amazon campus that opened last year and encompasses 9.5 acres with enough capacity to support more than 15,000 employees. It's the only Amazon-owned campus outside the US. Amazon also has a large customer service operation and three fulfillment centers in the city.

AWS earlier this week announced a new European region in Zurich, the financial capital of Switzerland. The Zurich region will join existing active regions in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and the UK. A Spain AWS region is scheduled for launch by 2023.  

Other cities earmarked for new AWS regions include Jakarta, Indonesia and Osaka, Japan.     

AWS says the forthcoming Hyderabad region will help developers, startups, enterprise, education, and non-profits run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in India.  

"Together with our AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, we're providing customers with more flexibility and choice, while allowing them to architect their infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability across geographic locations," said Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services.