Alphabet Inc’s Google is ramping up cloud infrastructure in India with a second cluster of data centers in and around the capital, New Delhi, to meet increasing customer demand in a key growth market, senior company executives said.
The Google cloud region in New Delhi and its outskirts is the US tech giant’s second such piece of infrastructure in the country and the 10th in the Asia-Pacific region.
“We have seen enormous growth in demand for Google cloud services in India, so expanding our footprint in a new cloud region gives us the ability to offer more capacity for growth over many years,” Google Cloud chief executive officer Thomas Kurian told a news conference this week ahead of a formal announcement yesterday. “It’s a large commitment from us in capital and infrastructure investment, and it’s designed to allow us to capture the opportunity that we see around growth.”
The new infrastructure would help provide solutions for problems such as disaster recovery within India and ensure low latency for many state-run firms in and around New Delhi, Kurian added.
Google did not say how much it had invested to set up the new cloud facilities.
India’s fledgling start-up economy has also helped drive and accelerate the use of cloud services, Google Cloud India unit managing director Bikram Singh Bedi said.
Google Cloud counts home-grown social network ShareChat, online travel firm Cleartrip and private sector lender HDFC Bank among its Indian customers.
Google has bet big on India. Last year, it invested US$4.5 billion in Jio Platforms, the digital unit of oil-to-telecoms conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd, from a so-called US$10 billion digitization fund targeted for the country.
Last month, Google said that it was forging a partnership with Jio to help India’s biggest wireless carrier with technology solutions for corporate and consumer offerings ahead of the launch of 5G services.
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