Bengaluru: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company plans to invest $3 billion in India in cloud and AI infrastructure, including setting up new data centres over the next two years. He said the company was also committed to training 10 million people with AI skills by 2030.
The $3 billion additional investment in India, Nadella said, would represent the single-largest expansion in the region. “The diffusion rate of AI in India is exciting. This is the golden age for systems when it comes to innovation,” he told more than 3,000 developers who had assembled to listen to him at a massive exhibition centre in Bengaluru on Tuesday.
In his nearly 11 years as CEO, Nadella has transformed Microsoft with his bets on cloud computing and AI, and the infusion of a culture of collaboration, enabling the pioneering computing company to become the second in the world to touch $3 trillion in market capitalisation (the first was Apple).
A lot of Microsoft’s work today is driven by its vast base of engineers in India. The company also sees India as an increasingly attractive market.
“I had a chance to meet Prime Minister [Narendra] Modiji yesterday and it was fantastic. It’s great to listen to his vision of how he wants to drive AI missions. It’s the combination of the ‘yojanas’ (schemes), the India Stack, the entrepreneurial energy in this country, and the demographics on both the consumer and business sides that are all coming together in a virtuous cycle,” Nadella further explained.
Emphasising the advances in AI and the increasingly critical role it will play in the economy, Nadella said infrastructure today needs to be thought of differently from the traditional ways. “With infrastructure, there’s a new formula for any country or company. I think of that formula as tokens per dollar per watt. Fundamentally, their (country or company) growth depends on how efficiently they can drive that equation,” he said.
Tokens per dollar per watt is a measure of the efficiency of AI applications, essentially signifying how many tokens (units of information) can be generated per dollar spent on computing power, while also considering the energy consumption (measured in watts) required to produce those tokens. Essentially, it highlights the cost-effective and energy-efficient performance of an AI-driven system.
This infrastructure, Nadella said, needs to be the highest priority.
Microsoft, which counts Air India, PwC, and Biocon among its customers in India, said it’s copiloting South Asia’s AI transformation with 800 customers and fivefold returns for every dollar the company invests in GenAI, with 70% of its customers seeing productivity benefits.
Earlier in the day, in an interaction with Infosys co-founder and chairman Nandan Nilekani, Nadella drew a parallel between humans and a “swarm of (AI) agents” as the next frontier that would be a significant source of enhanced productivity.
Responding to Nadella’s question on contextualising AI adoption in India, Nilekani said: “I think India will be the use case capital of AI in the world. We have several things working for us. We have 15 years of experience in building population-scale digital infrastructure, which makes it cheaper and allows for high-volume, billions of transactions. We know that game well.”
Nilekani said Indians are quick to adapt and accept new technology. “UPI was launched about seven years ago. Now, there are 400 million users and 16 billion transactions a month. It’s unbelievable that this can happen. If you look at Aadhaar authentications, it’s all AI-based because we have to do liveness detection for biometrics, so people don’t spoof it,” he added.
Responding to a question on his advice to global CEOs, Nadella said “change management is the hard thing”, noting that tools like Copilot require new workflows.
Caption 1: Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, with developers who participated in the AI Odyssey programme. Over the past 30 days, Microsoft has equipped more than 100,000 developers with AI skills that will help them advance their career
Caption 2: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in conversation with Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani at the Microsoft AI Tour held in Bengaluru on Tuesday