Asian Tech Press (Mar. 8) -- Software giant Microsoft has announced that it will build its fourth data center in India's southern state of Telangana.

India is one of the world's fastest growing markets in the digital consumer field, and Microsoft's strong rival in the cloud business, Amazon, had announced a $2.8 billion investment to build a second data center here in 2020.

Anant Maheshwari, president of Microsoft India, did not respond positively to rumors that it would cost $2 billion to build the latest data center.

"A public cloud data center is not a one time investment, it is a continuous investment that we have," Maheshwari explained, "In the last two years, we doubled the capacity in the existing three data centers."

At the same time, Microsoft will continue to increase its India workforce from the current 18,000.