Amazon Web Services (AWS) appears to be planning to build at least one cloud data center in India in 2016, following announcements by Microsoft and IBM.

The cloud giant is going to build data centers during 2016, Amazon’s head of India Bikram Bedi said at a conference. If confirmed, the move would allow Amazon to offer better performance and local storage of cloud data, and help comply with increasing demands for data sovereignty. 

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– Thinkstock / Tashatuvango

Indian expansion

“We are setting up data centers in India in 2016,” Bedi told the Digital India & Innovation Conclave 2015, according to TeleAnalysis.

The Indian data center market will be worth $2 billion in 2016, according to a forecast by Gartner Group. However, it is a tough market, suffering from poor power infrastructure. Local telecoms giant Tata is understood to be selling up its data centers, despite years spent acquiring them. 

IBM has announced its second SoftLayer data center in India, in Chennai, adding to an existing Mumbai facility. Microsoft recently opened three data centers in Pune, Chennai and Mumbai India to support its Azure cloud and Office 365 SaaS product.