Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are intensifying their India push with a combined $52 billion in fresh investment, underscoring the country’s rising status as a key growth market for artificial intelligence, cloud services and online retail.

E-commerce giant Amazon on Wednesday boosted its India investment pledge to $35 billion through 2030, expanding its earlier commitment in one of its key overseas markets. The spending will span online retail, AI-driven digitization, a logistics buildout and export initiatives for small and medium businesses. The company has already poured in billions of dollars in these areas to compete with Walmart Inc.-controlled Flipkart and a rising cohort of homegrown players that have chipped at its market share.

A day earlier, Microsoft committed $17.5 billion over four years to ramp up AI and cloud infrastructure in India. The company will seek to enhance data center capacity, train up the local workforce and collaborate to build sovereign tech capabilities. The spending represents Microsoft’s largest investment in Asia and follows an expansion of its cloud footprint in India over the years.

The twin commitments highlight a broader push by U.S. technology giants to cement their position in India. The world’s most populous country has over a billion internet users and is expected to grow into one of the largest markets for online sales and cloud computing in the decades ahead. India’s digitally savvy population and government support for tech initiatives make the South Asian country a key battleground for Microsoft, Amazon and rivals from Alphabet Inc.’s Google to Meta Platforms Inc.

The wave of mega investments in cloud-accelerated AI is rolling in despite the absence of a proven path to profits in India, or elsewhere. India offers an unmatched combination of scale and a relatively forgiving regulatory stance, compared with some other markets in Asia and Europe. India’s appeal is boosted by the fact that China, one of the world’s most promising internet markets, is effectively sealed off for U.S. Big Tech.

That’s also why companies such as OpenAI and Google are offering their AI assistants for free to users in India. Localized usage patterns from India can help train AI models in diverse accents, languages and logic flows — all critical for advancing the technology globally.

“When you have a health worker in a village looking after a new mother with the power of AI in their hands, that’s when you know that this AI is amounting to something,” Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in a keynote address in New Delhi on Wednesday.

Just meters away from Nadella, Amazon held its annual conference in the same convention center in the heart of the Indian capital. The summit named Smbhav, the Hindi word for “possible,” drew local and global company executives, startup founders as well as government officials. The exhibition hall showcased several of Amazon’s e-commerce initiatives in the country.

Here, the company outlined plans to expand businesses such as quick commerce and its cloud arm Amazon Web Services. The planned outlay, through 2030, will help create an additional 1 million jobs in India, it said.

“We find ourselves in one of the most disruptive moments in our history in terms of AI,” Amit Agarwal, Amazon’s senior vice president for emerging markets, said in an interview, declining to specify what portion of the investment goes to which business. “We have such a large opportunity ahead of us.”

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