Amazon and Microsoft are plowing billions of dollars of AI funding into India, with the e-retail giant pledging to spend $35 billion there by 2030, and Microsoft earmarking $17.5 billion over four years to develop the AI frontier and integrate the technology “at population scale.” The funds are expected to encourage AI-powered digitization, cloud growth, increased exports and new job creation — all national priorities for the South Asian territory. Amazon has already invested nearly $40 billion in India, which is emerging as a global AI and cloud hub. The new investment is Microsoft’s biggest yet in Asia and follows a $3 billion India commitment announced earlier this year.

“These are big bets on India by Big Tech and speaks to the AI revolution coming to India over the coming years,” Wedbush Securities Global Head of Tech Research Dan Ives tells The Wall Street Journal.

In an Amazon news post timed to the sixth edition of the Amazon Smbhav Summit in New Delhi, the company says its investment “will create jobs, boost cumulative exports to $80 billion, and deliver AI benefits to 15 million small businesses.”

“India is one of the fastest‑growing regions for AI spending within Asia Pacific,” IDC Regional Head of Research for AI and Big Data Deepika Giri tells CNBC. For Amazon, that explosive growth is expected to translate to “an additional 1 million direct, indirect, induced and seasonal jobs in India” as well as quadrupling exports.

The boom is contrasted by a shortage of sophisticated AI and HPC compute infrastructure, creating significant opportunity for those with funds to invest, CNBC adds, noting that in India, AI is becoming “more regionalized due to trade tensions and tariffs, with infrastructure as a central pillar of those strategies.”

Against that backdrop, “the country is emerging as a frontier AI nation,” according to a Microsoft news post. The new funds will include “skilling initiatives” aimed at expanding Microsoft’s existing workforce of more than 22,000 employees across India working on everything from model development to engineering.

“Microsoft also said it is rolling out new sovereign cloud options for Indian customers, including a Sovereign Public Cloud now available across its India regions and a Sovereign Private Cloud powered by Azure Local for both connected and air-gapped operations,” TechCrunch reports, explaining that the offerings will “help enterprises meet regulatory and data-residency requirements and support high-performance workloads with access to the latest Nvidia GPUs and Microsoft 365 services.”