AWS Data Centres : After AWS data centres in Dubai hit, why Amazon and Microsoft may be looking to reroute West Asia data centre workload to these cities in India |

Major cloud companies, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, are reportedly exploring plans to redirect data centre workloads from parts of West Asia to locations such as India and Singapore. This reported move follows recent disruptions in the region caused by the conflict between Iran, and the US and Israel. A report by the Economic Times cited people familiar with the discussions to make this claim.“Immediate capacity is being sought in locations including Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi to reroute critical workloads, especially for banking clients. Keeping latency in mind, these are the best-suited locations,” an executive at an infrastructure company told ET. In this case, latency refers to the impact of distance on data processing speed.The discussions follow drone strikes on March 2 that hit two AWS data centres in the United Arab Emirates and another in Bahrain, disrupting several digital services across the region. The outages affected banking apps, airport operations in Dubai and Kuwait, and the UAE stock market, which was temporarily shut due to technology disruptions. According to AWS updates, 25 services remain “disrupted” in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1), while 34 services are listed as “degraded.” Two availability zones in Bahrain—mec1-az2 and mec1-az3—also remain impaired.Separately, global reports suggest that a Microsoft Azure facility in Tehran may have been targeted, although the company has not reported any service disruptions so far.

How AWS and Microsoft Azure’s temporary workload shift can help India

Despite these measures currently being considered temporary responses, they may lead to additional investment in India as global enterprise clients evaluate long-term backup options in the country, people familiar with the discussions told ET.Global hyperscale cloud companies and Indian conglomerates, including Reliance Industries, Adani Group, Tata Group and Larsen & Toubro, have collectively committed about $270 billion toward data centre development. These investments are expected to increase India’s cumulative data centre capacity from about 1.4 gigawatts to around 10 gigawatts over the next five to seven years, the report added.“The Middle East altogether is a critical cloud region with a cumulative data centre capacity of 1 GW… and major clients have evoked disaster recovery plans since the tensions escalated last week,” said Piyush Somani, managing director at Pune-based ESDS Software Solutions.Somani added that India and Singapore are supported by subsea cable networks that connect IT workloads toward eastern regions, while Europe provides similar connectivity for westward traffic.“However, given the current geopolitical stance, India appears to be a more peaceful and safer location for temporary rerouting,” he added.Somani also noted that India currently has available capacity because several companies have added data centre infrastructure over the past 12–15 months.In general, data centre operators maintain redundancy and backup infrastructure across multiple geographic regions near their primary facilities. However, because the wider Gulf region is experiencing tensions, cloud providers are considering diverting traffic to regions such as Europe, the United States and the Asia-Pacific.In a recent update, Amazon Web Services said, “We strongly recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS regions. Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected regions.”The report also cited a cloud analyst at a research company to claim that other potential locations include Thailand and Indonesia but land and power constraints in these markets limit expansion. “The only opportunity for abundance right now is India, along with favourable tax policies from the government,” the analyst noted.