AWS Launches Gen AI Service Amazon Bedrock in India

Bengaluru, May 15 (PTI) Cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday announced the launch of its generative AI service Amazon Bedrock in the Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) region, promising lower latency and simplified services.

The availability in the region will help customers nationwide, including public sector organisations and regulated industries, to innovate and scale with generative AI applications, according to the Amazon subsidiary.

Speaking at the AWS Summit in Bengaluru, Head of Business Development at AWS India and South Asia, V G Sundar Ram said Bedrock is built to efficiently handle complexity in large data sets.

The Mumbai centre, he said, would further expedite processes with low latency being one of the benefits.

"This will fundamentally change the way companies operate. A lot of tasks which earlier were too difficult to automate can now be automated to a great extent, in a way that will augment the way people do their jobs," he told PTI.

Bedrock operates on a subscription-based model with around 10,000 customers globally. CoWin, DigiLocker, and DigiYatra are some of its India-specific offerings. It became generally available through select regions worldwide in 2023.

Ram said the need for the technology rose from the huge datasets and requirement for a big amount of computing power at a cheap cost.

"The availability in India is a big plus-point, it was a blocker for many customers who didn't want their data to move across borders for analytics, or the latency was becoming high because they had to use it from a different region. The interest levels have gone up significantly after the India availability was known," he added.

Ram said AWS will adopt a "multipronged strategy' to accelerate and increase the adoption in India.

"Investment has to be seen as a multidimensional aspect...we are investing in alternate power and green energy sources, we are investing in training people, infrastructure, we have also set up local zones in Delhi and Calcutta," he said.

Talking about the ambivalent nature of GenAI, Ram said every new technology has pros and cons.

"As a responsible leader in the market, we take it very seriously to educate our customers on the benefits as well as the dangers," he said.

Last year, AWS announced plans to invest Rs 1,05,600 crore (USD 12.7 billion) into cloud infrastructure in India by 2030, which will support an estimated average of 1,31,700 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in Indian businesses each year.

Amazon India has more than 1,00,000 full-time employees.