Puneet Chandok, who resigned from his position as president of commercial services for Amazon Web Services India and South Asia last week, is likely to join rival Microsoft India, according to the reports. Both companies are vying to satisfy the nation’s expanding demand for cloud services. Talks of him joining Microsoft have been doing rounds for a while now.

Meanwhile, Chandok as well as Microsoft’s spokesperson had nothing to say about the matter. As per Moneycontrol, AWS did not make any comments either,  except for confirming that after his four years tenure at the firm, Chandok is stepping down. There are still speculations about whether Chandok will replace Microsoft India’s President Anant Maheshwari or take up a new responsibility in the company. Reportedly, Chandok is likely to get a crucial role within the firm.

Maheshwari has been the face of Microsoft in India. He was prominently featured during CEO Satya Nadella’s visit to the country and maintains a close relationship with policymakers to discuss the opportunities brought about by India’s digital transformation. Following AWS’s announcement that it would invest $12.7 billion in India’s cloud infrastructure by 2030, creating 131,700 full-time equivalent jobs, Chandok announced his resignation, effective August 31, 2023.

Its significant investment in India comes at a time when business spending has decreased due to a challenging macroeconomic environment, slowing growth in its cloud computing business. Competitors of AWS like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM have increased their presence by establishing data centres and cloud regions and also view India as a key growth market.

While Google invested $1 billion in new data centres to expand its cloud services in India, Microsoft recently announced that it would establish its largest India data centre region in Hyderabad with an investment of more than Rs 15,000 crore over 15 years. In fact, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronic and IT, recently stated that he expects the country to become the largest market for servers in the world given the growth of cloud technology in the nation.