San Francisco - March 7 - on Monday, US local time, software giant Microsoft announced that it would build a fourth data center in India. India is one of the fastest growing markets in digital consumption. Anant mahehwari, head of Microsoft India, said the company was making long-term investments in India, but declined to confirm local media reports that the latest data center construction cost $2 billion. Mahwari explained: "the public cloud data center is not a one-time investment, we will continue to invest in it. In the past two years, the capacity of our three existing data centers in India has doubled." According to IDC, a market research company, the overall public cloud service market in India is expected to reach US $10.8 billion by 2025. The Indian government has been urging foreign technology companies to store more data locally, which is interpreted as an attempt to tighten regulation of large technology companies. Mahwari said that even during the epidemic, the number of Microsoft employees in India has always been increasing, currently 18000. In the future, Microsoft will continue to increase the number of employees in India. Maheshwari confirmed: "Microsoft has provided services to more than 340000 companies in India." The new data center is located in the southern Indian state of telangana. Mahwari said that Microsoft's business model relies on partners to build additional services on its cloud platform azure, which has helped it build new businesses worth about $10 billion over the past five years. However, Microsoft's main competitors are also joining the Indian competition. Amazon announced at the end of 2020 that it would spend $2.8 billion to build a second data center in India, while Adani group announced last year that it planned to build six data center parks across India. (Xinhua News Agency)