Amazon commits to invest $26B in India through 2030

Amazon.com Inc. has committed to invest an additional $6.5 billion in India by 2030, bringing its total spending plans in that country to almost $26 billion.

The latest investment was announced late Friday after Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy (pictured) met with India Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the U.S.

Jassy didn’t offer any breakdown of where the money would be invested, but it follows an announcement last month where the company said its cloud computing unit Amazon Web Services Inc. would invest $12.9 billion in India by the end of the decade.

Prior to that, Amazon said it was committing another $6.5 billion into India to boost its e-commerce business, which faces tough competition from rivals such as Reliance Retail Ltd., owned by the billionaire Mukesh Ambani, and Walmart Inc.’s Flipkart.

Amazon isn’t the only big American company to have announced a significant dollar investment in India during Modi’s state visit to the U.S. Last week, the U.S. computer chipmaking equipment provider Applied Materials Inc. announced plans to pump $400 million into a new engineering center in India. The memory chip firm Micron Technology Inc. trumped that, announcing plans to spend $825 million building its first-ever dynamic random-access memory and flash memory assembly and test facility in the country.

In a blog post, Amazon said Modi and Jassy discussed topics including supporting Indian startups, job creation, exports, digitization and ways to empower individuals and small businesses to better compete on the global stage.

Separately, Google LLC CEO Sundar Pichai also met with Modi and announced his company’s plans to open a new global fintech operations center in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City in the Indian state of Gujarat. That office will support the local operations of Google’s payment service GPay, the company told Reuters.

“We shared that Google is investing $10 billion in the India digitization fund, and we are continuing to invest through that,” Pichai said after meeting Modi.

Modi reportedly also met with Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella, but neither of those companies committed to any major investments.

Photo: SiliconANGLE