As the global race to build AI infrastructure accelerates, India has offered foreign cloud providers zero taxes through 2047 on services sold outside the country if they run those workloads from Indian data centers — a bid to attract the next wave of AI computing investment, even as power shortages and water stress threaten expansion in the South Asian nation.
On Sunday, India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced (PDF) the proposal in the country’s annual budget, offering a tax holiday — effectively zero taxes — on revenues from cloud services sold outside India if those services are run from data centers in the country. Sales to Indian customers would have to be routed through locally incorporated resellers and taxed domestically, she told parliament. The budget also proposes a 15% cost-plus safe harbour for Indian data-center operators providing services to related foreign entities.
The announcement comes as U.S. cloud giants including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft race to add data-center capacity worldwide to support the surge in artificial-intelligence workloads, with India emerging as an increasingly attractive location for new investment. The country offers a large pool of engineering talent and growing demand for cloud services, and has positioned itself as a key alternative to the U.S., Europe, and parts of Asia for expanding compute infrastructure.
In October, Google said it would invest $15 billion to build an AI hub and expand data-center infrastructure in India, its largest commitment in the country to date, following a $10 billion commitment in 2020. Microsoft followed in December with plans to invest $17.5 billion by 2029 to expand its AI and cloud footprint, funding new data centers, infrastructure, and training programs. Amazon has also stepped up its spending in December, saying it would invest an additional $35 billion in India by 2030, taking its total planned commitment to about $75 billion as it expands its retail and cloud operations.
India’s domestic data-center sector is also ramping up to meet global demand. In November, Digital Connexion, a joint venture backed by Reliance Industries, Brookfield Asset Management, and Digital Realty Trust, said it would invest $11 billion by 2030 to develop a 1-gigawatt, AI-focused data center campus in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. The project, spanning about 400 acres in Visakhapatnam, is among the largest announced in India and underscores growing interest from both domestic and global investors in building AI-ready infrastructure in the country. Separately, Adani Group said in December it plans to invest up to $5 billion alongside Google in its AI data center project in the country.
However, scaling up data center capacity in India may prove difficult, as patchy power availability, high electricity costs, and water scarcity pose key constraints for energy-intensive AI workloads. Those challenges could slow construction and raise operating costs for cloud providers.
“The announcements on data centers signal that they are being treated as a strategic business sector rather than just back-end infrastructure,” said Rohit Kumar, founding partner of New Delhi-based The Quantum Hub, a public policy and tech consulting firm. The push is likely to attract more private investment and strengthen India’s position as a regional data and compute hub, though execution challenges around power availability, land access, and state-level clearances remain, he added.
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