Data centre surge reaches India as American tech giants invest billions

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, was striding across a stage in New Delhi, extolling his company’s $17.5 billion investment in artificial intelligence and the benefits it would bring to his native country’s 1.4 billion people. While he was speaking, Amazon made a rival announcement, promising to throw $35 billion into AI-driven projects across India.

A flood of money for data centres, cloud computing and other hardware has come to India. Two months before the near-simultaneous Microsoft-Amazon announcements, Google committed $15 billion to data centres…