Microsoft to invest Rs 16,000 cr to set up 3 more data centres in Hyderabad

The Telangana government on Thursday said tech giant Microsoft will be investing Rs 16,000 crore for setting up three more data centres, taking the total proposed centres to six.

The IT firm had already announced its first captive data centre investment of three campuses early in 2022 with an investment of Rs 16,000 crore. With the new announcement, the total number of data centres that Microsoft plans to set up here would go up to six, an official release said.

An official release from Telangana's IT and Industries Minister K T Rama Rao said, the upcoming projects were discussed at the Microsoft Cafe at Davos, Switzerland in the presence of Principal Secretary for IT and and Industries Jayesh Ranjan and Ahmed Mazhari, President, Asia, for Microsoft.

In a testament to Telangana and Microsoft's commitment to help each other grow, Microsoft announced its first captive data centre investment of three campuses early in 2022.

While the earlier investment commitment entailed three data centres in Hyderabad, they now target to reach six total data centers in the state with each centre serving 100 MW of IT load on an average, it said.

These centres form an integral part of Microsoft's goal of strengthening its cloud infrastructure to serve Azure's customers in India and worldwide. All the six data centres are estimated to be deployed phase-wise in the next 10-15 years, it said.

Telangana had earlier signed a MoU with Microsoft to enable several beneficial activities such as skilling, internship programmes and cloud adoption. As part of Telangana's cloud adoption, the state is working with Microsoft Azure and others to ensure citizen services have the best of infrastructure as part of its tech stack.

On the occasion, Rama Rao said, "Microsoft and Hyderabad have a very long-term mutually beneficial relationship and I am very happy to learn that Microsoft will expand in Telangana with such huge digital infrastructure projects. I look forward to seeing Microsoft continue to grow in the State."

Ahmed Mazhari, said, "Hyderabad is one of our most important markets across the world and we will continue to invest in the city. The data centre projects we will deploy in Telangana are the some of the fully-owned data centre projects in India by Microsoft. Apart from data centres, we will work with the government to identify special projects and support them in implementing them.