Amazon India is in the final stages of buying around 40-45 acres of land in Palava, near Mumbai, from Macrotech Developers for around ₹500-600 crore, where it plans to set up a data centre for Amazon Web Services’ generative AI applications, sources said.
The deal will likely be finalised in the next few months, said sources with direct knowledge of the deal. After the land acquisition, the real estate company will build the data centre for the e-commerce giant, they added.
There were no responses from the Amazon India communications team or Macrotech Developers to emails seeking clarifications.
Generative AI takes artificial intelligence one step further and helps organisations devise solutions and applications never thought of before. The data centre capacity needed to support GenAI differs from that required for cloud workloads regarding power, space, and cooling.
Amazon Web Services provides cloud technologies on which companies, organisations, and institutes can build solutions to offer their services. It has about 31 per cent market share in cloud infrastructure globally, according to Statista, ahead of Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud Platform. India is a key market for AWS, which has the largest footprint outside the US, having spent $3.7 billion in the country between 2016 and 2022, primarily in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region.
Last year, Amazon had said it would be investing $12.7 billion in building up its data centre infrastructure network in India by the end of the decade.
AWS has two data centre infrastructure regions in India: the Mumbai region, which was launched in 2016, and the Hyderabad region, which was launched in 2022. The two AWS regions are designed to provide Indian customers with multiple options to run workloads with even greater resilience and availability, securely store data in India, and serve end users with low latency.
In May 2023, it leased around 4.5 lakh square feet of land from K Raheja Corp in Navi Mumbai for 15 years to set up a data centre. In 2022, it had leased 5.5 acres of land from Larsen & Toubro in Powai for the same purpose.