Microsoft has opened its India South Central cloud region in Hyderabad to general availability. With this, the company is adding a fourth Azure region in India. The launch is aimed at customers that need local compute for AI, stronger business continuity and more options for regulated workloads. The new site is Microsoft’s largest India data center hub, and Adani Group and HDFC Bank are among the early users.
The region has three Availability Zones, was built with a resilient design aligned to India’s regulatory and seismic-zone requirements, and is intended to support mission-critical workloads at scale.
According to Microsoft, Azure demand in India has grown at double-digit rates over the last two years. Also, IDC’s forecast says that India’s public cloud spending will reach US$45.7 billion by 2030, growing at 22.2% annually, with AI spending expanding at roughly double that pace. These numbers explain why cloud regions are still being built at speed: enterprises are moving from experimentation to production AI, and that requires more local infrastructure.
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Microsoft’s India president, Puneet Chandok, said the company keeps hearing the same question from customers: how to move faster from AI experiments to durable business value, using infrastructure close to where data lives, and decisions are made.
“Whether it is a Frontier Firm already running AI at scale or an enterprise taking its first steps, the question we hear most often is: how do we move faster from experimenting with AI to creating durable business value with AI? That requires trusted infrastructure close to where data lives, teams work, and decisions are made. The Microsoft India South Central datacenter region is a critical part of that foundation, backed by Microsoft’s $20.5 billion investment commitment to India’s cloud and AI future. Making India AI-first is about bringing together the scale to support growth, the skills to unlock value, the sovereignty organizations expect, and the security they depend on. We are not investing in infrastructure to keep up with demand. We are investing in India’s ability to set the pace for the world.” said, Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India and South Asia.
Four cloud regions in one country
With the Hyderabad centre live, Microsoft now operates four cloud regions in India: Pune, Chennai, Mumbai and Hyderabad. That gives Microsoft a stronger position as India’s largest cloud-computing provider, while Microsoft says the new region adds more local choice for enterprise-grade security, compliance and governance.
Four cloud regions in one country will let enterprises separate production and disaster recovery more cleanly, keep workloads nearer to users, and meet data residency needs. For banks, platforms and large industrial users, that matters as much as the size of the data center itself.
Who benefits most
Enterprises that run large, regulated or latency-sensitive workloads will benefit from these regions. Microsoft says the region is meant for organizations modernizing critical systems, building digital services and deploying AI with enterprise-grade security and compliance controls. The company is targeting India’s fast-growing AI market and notes that Microsoft has committed about $20.5 billion to expand its India operations.
Microsoft Hyderabad cloud region is already seeing strong early demand from Adani Group, Bajaj Finserv, HDFC Bank and PB Pay. Reuters separately reported Adani Group and HDFC Bank as early users.
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Microsoft describes it as a three-Availability-Zone region with resilient design aligned to local requirements. The company says it uses enhanced mechanical cooling with air-cooled chillers, which means the site is designed to consume zero water for cooling. It is being introduced at a moment when Microsoft says enterprise AI adoption in India is moving from pilots to production.
That combination makes the region more than a regional expansion. It is a signal that hyperscale cloud in India is being built for AI workloads, regulatory limitations and infrastructure robustness all at once.
Microsoft Hyderabad region launch shows that India is no longer only a growth market for cloud consumption. It is becoming an operating base for AI infrastructure. Microsoft’s fourth region in India gives the company more room to serve enterprises that need local storage, local compute and stronger continuity planning while they move AI into production.
