Amazon’s India, South Asia Head of Cloud Division, Puneet Chandok, Resigns: Details

The India and South Asia head of Amazon.com’s cloud division, Puneet Chandok, has resigned with effect from August 31, the company said on Friday.

Chandok had taken the helm of Amazon Web Services in June 2019.

Vaishali Kasture, currently head of the enterprise for mid-market and global businesses at AWS India and South Asia, would take on the role of interim leader of commercial business for the unit, Amazon India said.

The news came over two weeks after Amazon’s cloud computing unit revealed plans to invest $12.87 billion (roughly Rs. 10,60,12 crore) in India by 2030, doubling down on its past investments to cater to the growing demand for such services in Asia’s No. 3 economy.

The interim provides an opportunity for other cloud companies such as Azure and Google Cloud Platform, along with homegrown players, to make aggressive bids for accounts, said Akshara Bassi, an analyst at Counterpoint Research.

In April, AWS released a suite of technologies aimed at helping other companies develop their own chatbots and image-generation services backed by artificial intelligence.

The firm also partnered with startup Hugging Face, a software development hub, in February to make it easier to carry out artificial intelligence work (AI) in Amazon’s cloud.

AWS, the biggest cloud computing provider, already offers tools to help developers create AI-based software, including proprietary computing chips for raining AI algorithms on huge amounts of data at lower cost than rivals to services that reduce how much time it takes to create a chatbot or other AI products. 

© Thomson Reuters 2023