Indian billionaire Bhavish Aggarwal is offering developers in his home country a full year of free cloud services to abandon Azure, escalating a feud with Microsoft over alleged censorship on its LinkedIn platform.
Aggarwal, who has founded three unicorn startups including ride-hailing provider Ola, said the offer from his AI venture Krutrim would be open “in perpetuity.” The 38-year-old made the pledge Saturday after accusing Microsoft’s LinkedIn of deleting his posts criticizing the professional networking site and its AI.
“The pronouns issue I wrote about is a woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong in India. I wouldn’t have waded into this debate but clearly Linkedin has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticise it” wrote Aggarwal.
“They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out. And if they can do this to me, I’m sure the average user stands no chance. As a founder and CEO, this western DEI system has a major impact on my business as it grows an entitlement mindset in our professional lives and I will fight it.”
The move marks a sharp reversal for Aggarwal and Microsoft. The two announced the Indian startup’s move to Azure to much fanfare in 2017. Aggarwal didn’t say what all cloud offerings Krutrim is offering, and it’s unclear how reliable they are.
India, a vital overseas market for U.S. tech giants, boasts a user base of over 500 million and a vast pool of skilled developers. The South Asian nation has shifted its focus in recent years on developing its own technology infrastructure to reduce dependence on foreign countries. This shift has been accompanied by policies prioritizing the rights and interests of Indian citizens, signaling a growing desire for technological self-sufficiency and data sovereignty.
Aggarwal also pledged Saturday to work with the developer community to build an open and digital public infrastructure for social media, similar to the nation’s popular payments rail UPI and biometric authentication system Aadhaar.