Overview
- Microsoft activated the India South Central Azure region in Hyderabad, which launched on Thursday, August 6, 2026, and is now serving early-access customers.
- The new region is the company’s largest in India and adds three availability zones built for high resilience and heavy AI training and inference workloads.
- The launch fulfils Microsoft’s roughly $20.5 billion investment pledge for cloud and AI infrastructure in India and includes sovereign-cloud offerings for data residency.
- Major Indian firms including Adani Group, HDFC Bank, Bajaj Finserv and PB Pay are among the first users, and Microsoft also complements its regions with two Reliance Jio partnership data centers.
- The move sharpens competition with AWS and Google as hyperscalers race to capture enterprise AI demand while raising questions about local power and water use that have dogged other projects.