Microsoft chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) Satya Nadella is in India, promoting the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools – Copilot, agentic AI, and datasets – and urging the government and domestic businesses to adopt them.
Microsoft’s big push follows rival Google’s recent $15-billion investment to set up a one-gigawatt (GW) data center in India, signaling a rising competition among global tech giants to dominate the country’s fast-growing digital market.
Nadella spoke in India for a second time this year on Wednesday in front of senior government officials and top executives of big domestic enterprises. On the sidelines, he also met billionaire Gautam Adani, showcasing Microsoft’s AI capabilities to the promoter of one of India’s largest conglomerates. The company backed its pitch by committing $17.5 billion to build AI infrastructure in India and skill 20 million people over four years.
“To be successful in the AI frontier, organizations need a mindset shift in order to deploy an AI system, which is really a learning system, from the ground-up—instead of simply adding an automation layer. This requires a mindset shift, which means you need to reskill yourself in order to think about things differently. And, in order to reskill yourself, you need everyday tools for it. And then, ultimately you’ll need the datasets that go with these tools—and this will define success in the AI era,” Nadella said.
Both Microsoft and Google have assured that data used on their AI platforms will remain within India’s borders. This explains why both the companies are investing in their data centers in the country.
Nadella spent 32 minutes talking about Microsoft’s products, and even demonstrated its AI platforms. He also ran slides naming 109 Indian companies that he claimed were already customers of Microsoft’s Copilot AI suite. Some of them include public-sector energy major Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Apollo Healthcare, Maruti Suzuki, Infosys and Tech Mahindra. At one point, Nadella even joked that he’s the project manager of his demonstration.
Last week, Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, told Mint that the Indian clients for its AI suite were no longer just pilots. “We’re seeing clients start deploying AI at scale, and we’re engaging with them by showcasing gains in efficiency and use cases,” he said.
Google, too, made similar claims. On November 13, Matt Renner, president of global revenue at Google Cloud, told mint in a roundtable that the company was showcasing its foundational AI capabilities to tap clients with long-term cloud-and-AI deals.
“We’re seeing a very strong demand increase for Google Cloud, and that is seen through public data. We’re seeing our overall growth rates increase over the last three quarters, and we’re growing faster than before. That’s not necessarily happening at the same pace as our competitors. This is because of AI, which has changed the conversations clients were having around hyperscalers—which were around what skills they had around Amazon and Microsoft. Today, Google can do what its competitors can do, but they can’t do everything that we can,” Renner said.
The brewing AI battle harks back to the previous eras when top tech firms clashed to capture India’s enterprise market, said Kashyap Kompella, a veteran AI analyst.
“Typically, India has always been a provider of tech services, and not a major generator of revenue. This is slowly beginning to change, as enterprises across the country give birth to a market that could generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for AI services each year. With China being a closed market and adoption in Europe and North America both slow, India could well be the next frontier for Big Tech to double down upon,” Kompella said.
In May this year, Google made its full suite of enterprise AI services available in India, coinciding with its US release, its top market. On 14 October, it announced the 1GW AI data centre, its largest outside the US. And on 18 November, Google launched its latest foundational model and agentic AI platforms for companies, also underlying localization of AI models and data processing in India.
Both Microsoft and Google now have their full suites of AI products and services in India, and have together announced $32.5 billion in investments toward AI and data centers in the country.
Analysts and industry stakeholders said that the push from the two Big Tech companies are part of their endeavor to win over large, multi-billion-dollar clients in India.
Generative AI products and services, a report by EY India in May this year said, will add $438 billion to India’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030. Cumulatively, in the next five years, generative AI may add up to $1.5 trillion in cumulative GDP to India, by the end of this decade.
“The push from Big Tech is therefore expected, since India represents major business avenues for the world’s largest foundational AI companies. Sovereign AI demand is expected to grow sharply, which all Big Tech companies are looking to tap. This would come across as a replay of the battle to capture India’s rising cloud services demand that played out earlier this decade. Now, with AI joining the party, Big Tech firms will be in a tussle to capture large clients. with long-term contracts for AI deployment,” said Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at Gartner.
