Image Source: Reuters)
Amazon just raised its stakes in India. The e-commerce giant announced on Wednesday that it will invest over $35 billion across all its businesses in the country through 2030. This builds on the nearly $40 billion Amazon has already pumped into India since entering the market over a decade ago.
The announcement came at Amazon’s sixth Smbhav Summit in New Delhi, and it signals something important: Amazon is not just fighting to maintain its position against Walmart-owned Flipkart and Reliance’s e-commerce push. It’s doubling down on becoming the infrastructure backbone for India’s digital transformation.
The Three-Part Strategy
Amazon isn’t scattering this money randomly. The company structured the investment around three clear pillars: AI-driven digitization, export growth, and job creation. Each pillar targets a different part of India’s economic structure.
The AI piece is where things get serious. Amazon plans to invest $12.7 billion specifically in cloud and AI infrastructure. This includes expanding data centers in Telangana and Maharashtra and building out the computing capacity that AI models and applications need. The company wants to bring AI tools to 15 million small businesses and provide AI literacy training to 4 million students in government schools by 2030.
Think about what that means practically. A small business owner in tier-3 cities can use AI-powered tools to create product listings in minutes. A student in a government school gets exposure to AI careers that they wouldn’t normally have access to. That’s not just corporate investment talk. That’s infrastructure that changes how people actually do business and think about careers.
The Export Push
The second pillar focuses on exports. Amazon has already enabled $20 billion in cumulative exports for Indian sellers. The company wants to quadruple that to $80 billion by 2030. That’s a massive number but not unreasonable given the trajectory. India has manufacturing clusters in Tirupur, Kanpur, Surat, and dozens of other places that could become global supply chains with proper digital infrastructure.
Amazon plans to run on-ground onboarding drives across more than 10 manufacturing clusters. They just partnered with the Apparel Export Promotion Council of India to focus specifically on fashion and textiles exports. The idea is to help Indian manufacturers become world-class sellers on the global marketplace, not just on Amazon but anywhere.
Jobs, Jobs, and More Jobs
The third pillar is employment. Amazon says this investment will create an additional 1 million direct, indirect, and seasonal jobs. For a country constantly wrestling with unemployment and underemployment, that’s a significant commitment. These jobs span warehouse operations, tech development, customer service, logistics, and support functions across all of Amazon’s Indian businesses.
Why Now? Why India?
The timing matters because Amazon is competing for India’s attention with Microsoft, Google, and a slew of other tech giants. All of them are racing to build AI infrastructure in India. The reason is straightforward: India has a massive, underserved market, a huge pool of tech talent, rapidly growing internet penetration, and a government pushing digital adoption.
AWS has trained 6.2 million people in cloud skills in India since 2017. That’s not a coincidence. Amazon is building an ecosystem where Indian developers, entrepreneurs, and businesses have no choice but to get comfortable with cloud and AI because the infrastructure and tools are right here.
The Competitive Pressure
This announcement also signals something about competitive dynamics in India. Flipkart and Amazon are locked in a brutal marketplace battle. Reliance is pushing hard with Jio platforms and its own e-commerce ambitions. Quick-commerce platforms like Blinkit and Zepto are grabbing share in specific categories.
Amazon’s mega-investment says: we’re not just a marketplace. We’re the infrastructure layer. We’re building the cloud, the AI, the logistics backbone that the entire Indian digital economy will eventually run on.
What It Means for Business
For Indian businesses, this could be transformational. Access to world-class AI infrastructure at scale has historically been available only to large corporations or startups with serious venture funding. Amazon’s push to democratize this for 15 million small businesses could fundamentally change productivity levels across India’s economy.
The real test will be execution. Indian businesses have heard big promises before. But Amazon’s track record of actually building infrastructure in India suggests this commitment has teeth. The company has invested early, stayed committed, and scaled operations steadily over the past dozen years.
If Amazon delivers on this plan, India’s digital economy could look very different by 2030.
