'India is slated to become number 1 community in the world with GitHub': Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Bengaluru: India is slated to become the number one community in the world with GitHub by 2030, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said.

Speaking at the Microsoft AI Tour in Bengaluru on Thursday, he said that it is fantastic to see the engagement and the type of projects that are coming out of this place, the contributions from India.

"We're building out GitHub as essentially Agent HQ (an agentic platform that unites every agent)," Nadella added.

GitHub is a cloud-based platform where one can share, store and work together with others to write code. GitHub projects that by 2030, there will be 57.5 million developers in India, surpassing the US that will have 54.7 million.

Talking about agentic AI and its significance, Nadella stressed on the importance of mindset shift, even for developers.

"We need even a new way to think about the frontier of the classic SDLC (software development life cycle), which has to change to a new form of AI- driven SDLC. I think that will be pretty critical," he said, adding that there would be a new model drop by Microsoft on Friday.

The tech giant on Tuesday announced over Rs 1.55 lakh crore ($17.5 billion) investment in India over four years (CY 2026 to 2029) to advance the country's cloud, AI infrastructure, skilling and ongoing operations.

"We're really excited about investing in India to make sure that we're able to bring the best infrastructure here. I had a chance to meet the Prime Minister a couple of days ago, and he talked through all of what we're trying to get done in India, and he was very encouraging of this investment, in particular, to drive this society, economy and the growth. This is the largest investment that we have made in Asia," he said.

Nadella also stressed on cyber resilience. "One important consideration that needs to be thought of in sovereignty is cyber resilience. At the end of the day, cyber security is an intelligence game. You can be sovereign and not have global intelligence. That sort of essentially means you'll be vulnerable. Thinking about that in the risk equation becomes very important, because if you are not really seeing what the threat actors all around the world are doing to protect yourself, you will miss the signal. We see a lot of the threat actions across the globe. We take all those trillions of daily signals, turn that into everyday defence, whether it's on Azure or on Windows," he added.

The company is building out Azure as the world's computer, and it has over 70 data centre regions all over the world. "In India, the footprint continues to grow. We now have central India, West India, South India, and we have a partnership with Jio as well," he added.