AWS has long been the default cloud choice for enterprises across India. It is mature, well-documented, and deeply embedded in how most organisations think about cloud infrastructure. But when it comes to AI and GPU workloads specifically, things have changed from the bygones era. 

A new category of AI-native cloud providers have emerged with infrastructure designed from the ground up for model training, fine-tuning, and inference. 

These platforms offer GPU access at materially lower committed rates, reduce the configuration overhead that GPU workloads typically require, and in several cases, provide better alignment with India’s data residency requirements than global general purpose cloud providers can by default. 

At the same time, AWS and the other general purpose cloud providers retain advantages in ecosystem depth, managed services breadth, and global reach.

The honest answer for most Indian AI teams is not to pick one or the other, but to understand where each category of provider genuinely excels so the compute budget goes to the right place.