In a groundbreaking announcement, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a series of strategic partnerships aimed at propelling India’s AI capabilities to new heights. Central to this effort is a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Indian government’s ‘India AI Mission,’ which aims to skill 500,000 individuals by 2026. The collaboration with India AI, a division of Digital India Corporation, seeks to harness the power of AI to foster innovation, boost productivity, and promote inclusive growth across the nation.
As part of the MoU, Microsoft and India AI will focus on upskilling a diverse group of individuals, including students, educators, developers, government officials, and women entrepreneurs. Additionally, the establishment of an AI Center of Excellence, known as ‘AI Catalysts,’ will support rural AI innovation and nurture 100,000 AI innovators and developers through various initiatives, such as hackathons and an AI marketplace. AI Productivity Labs will be set up at 20 National Skill Training Institutes (NSTIs) and NIELIT centers in ten states to provide foundational courses for 20,000 educators.
The partnership will also address crucial sectors like healthcare, education, accessibility, and agriculture by developing AI-enabled solutions for these citizen-scale domains. Puneet Chandok, President of Microsoft India and South Asia, expressed excitement about extending the benefits of the India AI mission to every corner of the country and democratizing access to technology and resources.
In a related development, Microsoft has entered a five-year strategic partnership with RailTel to advance digital, cloud, and AI transformation within the Indian railways and the public sector. A recent IDC study commissioned by Microsoft revealed a significant increase in AI usage in India, rising from 63 percent in 2023 to 72 percent in 2024. To further support this growth, Microsoft announced a $3 billion investment in cloud and AI infrastructure in India, including the establishment of new data centers over the next two years.
As part of its ambitious plans, Microsoft has also pledged to train and skill 10 million people in AI by 2030. The company has already empowered 2.4 million Indians, including civil servants, college students, and people with disabilities, with AI skills. The collaboration with SaaSBoomi, a leading community for B2B startups in India, aims to create over 200,000 new job opportunities and attract $1.5 billion in venture capital funding for the Indian AI and software-as-a-service (SaaS) ecosystem over the next five years.
During the ‘Microsoft AI Tour,’ the company highlighted the strategic collaboration’s goal of accelerating the growth of India’s AI and SaaS ecosystem, transforming the country into a product nation, and contributing to its trillion-dollar economy. Leveraging SaaSBoomi’s extensive network and Microsoft’s technological expertise, the partnership seeks to foster innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly in tier II cities.
The collaboration aims to impact over 5,000 startups and 10,000 entrepreneurs, upskill more than 150,000 startup employees, foster regional development in over 20 tier II cities, and support the emergence of over 50 unicorns and soonicorns. Microsoft’s commitment to advancing the AI ecosystem in India is further underscored by the launch of the AI Innovation Network by Microsoft Research (MSR) Lab. This initiative aims to deepen collaborations with digital natives, accelerating the transition from research to real, usable business solutions.
MSR India has already initiated partnerships with entities like Physics Wallah on math reasoning and is in discussions with other digital natives on various topics, including causal inference, optimizing Indic language models, prompt optimization, and reinforcement learning. With a long history of incubating startups and open-sourcing research technologies, Microsoft remains deeply invested in the responsible and sustainable growth of AI infrastructure in India.
