India Builds for the World with AWS at the Centre
At the AWS Summit in Mumbai, two themes stood out—scale and impact. Sandeep Dutta, president of AWS India and South Asia, opened the keynote by recalling two historic moments in India’s space journey—Mangalyaan’s Mars Orbiter Mission in 2014 and Chandrayaan-3’s landing near the lunar south pole in 2023. Both missions, he explained, were executed on budgets lower than that of the Hollywood film Gravity. “It proved beyond point our ability to create impact at scale and to be able to sustain that scale.” AWS is following a similar approach in India with large-scale, cost-effective efforts focused on impact. This year, the company is hosting three summits in Bengaluru, Mumbai and online, with over 50,000 participants expected. “This is not just another summit. It is a platform that allows us to propel the ambitions of our developers, customers and partners across India,” Dutta said. National-Scale Impact, Citizen-Centric Technology Dutta showcased how AWS is being used in projects that have national reach. The Poshan Tracker app from the women and child development ministry supports over 100 million beneficiaries across 1.4 million Anganwadi centres. “Poshan Tracker has truly become a citizen-scale nourishment monitoring platform,” he said. In the private sector, Juspay’s digital payments platform now processes $900 billion annually—up from $10 billion in 2010—and has reduced the cost per transaction by 45%. Dutta described this as “India’s ability to harness complex technology to serve all sections of society.” According to him, DigiLocker is a strong example of citizen-scale innovation, with more than 526 million users and 9.4 billion documents issued since 2015. He added that IndiaMART is helping break down language barriers in digital commerce, serving 350 million users weekly and translating over 5.5 million products with around 90% accuracy. Deepening Commitment to India AWS is ramping up its India investments. By 2030, it plans to invest $12.7 billion across its Mumbai and Hyderabad regions, contributing $23.3 billion to India’s GDP and supporting over 1.31 lakh full-time jobs annually. The company has also trained 5.9 million Indians in cloud skills since 2017, part of its efforts to bridge the national skill gap. “We continue to stay committed towards working towards India’s skilling needs,” Dutta said. Generative AI: India’s Competitive Edge Dutta shared several examples of how companies in India are using generative AI to drive efficiency and unlock new revenue opportunities. Zomato, for instance, has reduced its restaurant image processing time from 48 hours to 8 hours and brought down rejection rates from 75% to just 5%. Dhan, an online trading platform, has achieved a sixfold increase in trade execution speed and secured a 0.1% price advantage, moving from the 300th to the 9th position among online trading platforms in India. He also reiterated AWS’s sustainability push. Amazon is now the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable energy and holds 1.3 GW of renewable energy contracts in India. Tree-planting initiatives across summit locations added a local sustainability angle. Finally, AWS is launching its Marketplace in India, which Dutta likened to the “UPI moment of enterprise software procurement”. Users will be able to buy software in local currency, using UPI, credit cards, or net banking, and receive localised invoices. Quoting Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, Dutta said, “Our dreams have to be bigger, our ambitions higher, our commitments deeper and our efforts greater,” promising to bring that energy to India’s transformation journey. Building Blocks of Innovation Ganapathy Krishnamoorthy, vice president of database services at AWS, followed with a more technical perspective. “What if we could build anything you can imagine? At AWS, we give you the building blocks to do just that,” he said. He explained AWS’s approach to modular infrastructure, services that do one thing well and can be combined. For AWS, he said, security starts “right at the silicon and goes all the way up the stack”. AWS has built over six million kilometres of private fibre-optic cable and grown its network’s back-end capacity by 80% last year. Compute, Storage, and AI at Scale Krishnamoorthy detailed the compute advancement, including over 850 EC2 instance types and long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA. New P6 instances, for example, feature NVIDIA’s latest GPUs and offer fast access to training infrastructure via EC2 Capacity Blocks. He gave the example of Canva as a customer scaling generative AI to serve over 220 million monthly users. Krishnamoorthy also introduced Graviton4, AWS’s custom chip, which is 45% faster and 60% more energy-efficient than its predecessor. AI-focused chips like Trainium2 offer up to 4x training speed and 3x energy efficiency, with customers like Anthropic already using them. Storage and Data as a Foundation On storage, Krishnamoorthy spoke about S3’s evolution to handle advanced formats like Apache Iceberg. A new S3 bucket type will simplify data management, and S3 metadata tables will allow SQL queries using tools like Spark and Redshift. Databases remain his focus area. AWS has added vector support in Aurora for GenAI and launched new capabilities to ensure high availability, low latency, and minimal operational overhead. He hinted at more developments based on ongoing feedback from enterprise users. Customers Delight Leaders from Comviva and Maruti Suzuki shared how their organisations are leveraging AWS’ cloud and AI technologies to serve billions, modernise operations, and reshape customer experiences at scale. In the Fintech space, Comviva has enabled over 500 million people in underserved regions to access digital financial services. “People who were deprived of basic banking services in Africa, parts of Asia, and Eastern Europe are now connected financially,” Rajesh Chandiramani, CEO at Comviva said. AI plays a central role in personalisation and process automation. Comviva’s MarTech platform uses Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q to deliver hyper-personalised customer experiences. Its telco automation solution, BlueMarble BSS, simplifies operations and enables bundling of new offerings, aided by AWS infrastructure and AI tools. To support this scale, Comviva adopted multi-tenant architectures using EC2, RDS, and monitoring tools to serve four billion users in the near future. “We are building AI-first, cloud-ready technologies made in India for the globe,” Chandiramani said. On the other hand, Tapan Sahoo, head of digital enterprise, information and cyber security at Maruti Suzuki India, said the company has digitised 24 of 26 customer touchpoints and launched specialised apps for services like loyalty management and car maintenance. “This is our most ambitious project yet, a one-stop solution for consumer mobility needs and beyond,” he said. Built on AWS, the platform uses services such as OpenSearch, Amazon RDS, Kafka, and microservice-based architectures. The platform already serves over 1 lakh customers and includes features from booking to service tracking to loyalty management. Conclusion The AWS Summit in Mumbai was less about product announcements and more about signalling how AWS sees India, not just as a market but as a global innovation hub. The focus was on national-scale impact, localised infrastructure, and India-specific use cases, all pointing toward one goal: building from India, for India, and the world.
By 2030, the company plans to invest $12.7 billion across its Mumbai and Hyderabad regions, contributing $23.3 billion to India’s GDP and supporting over 1.31 lakh full-time jobs annually.
At the AWS Summit in Mumbai, two themes stood out—scale and impact. Sandeep Dutta, president of AWS India and South Asia, opened the keynote by recalling two historic moments in India’s space journey—Mangalyaan’s Mars Orbiter Mission in 2014 and Chandrayaan-3’s landing near the lunar south pole in 2023.
["AWS"]
["Anthropic", "GenAI", "AWS", "AI", "RAG", "Ray", "generative AI", "Kafka", "SQL", "R"]
["AI", "generative AI", "GenAI", "Anthropic", "Ray", "RAG", "AWS", "Kafka", "R", "SQL"]
Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.