Microsoft announced the general availability of its fourth India cloud region on 6 August 2026.
The new facility, named India South Central, is located in Hyderabad, Telangana.
It joins Microsoft's existing cloud regions in Pune, Chennai and Mumbai.
The Hyderabad region has three availability zones and uses air-cooled chillers requiring zero water for cooling.
The expansion forms part of a cumulative $20.5 billion investment commitment for India.
A cloud region is a geographic area containing multiple datacentres that together supply computing services — storage, networking, databases and increasingly artificial intelligence workloads. Within a region, availability zones are physically separate datacentre locations with independent power and cooling. The purpose of that separation is resilience: if one zone is disrupted by a power failure, flood or fire, workloads can continue running in another zone within the same region, without the delay that would come from shifting to a distant region. Local regions also matter for data residency, since many regulated sectors require that data remain within national borders.
Simple Analogy: A region is a city; availability zones are separate buildings in that city, each with its own generator. A fire in one building does not stop the business, because the same work is already running next door.
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General Awareness > Technology and business
A geographic area containing multiple datacentres that together provide cloud computing services.
A physically separate datacentre location within a cloud region, with independent power and cooling, designed for resilience.
Requirements that data be stored within a particular country's borders, often applied to regulated sectors such as banking.
A corporate sustainability commitment to replenish more water than is consumed in operations.