Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal Decides to Shift Cloud

From Microsoft Azure to Proprietary Krutrim Cloud Following LinkedIn Dispute

Ola, the EV giant founded by Bhavish Aggarwal, is making a significant shift in its cloud infrastructure, opting to transition from Microsoft Azure to its proprietary Krutrim Cloud. This decision, announced by Aggarwal himself, follows a recent dispute with LinkedIn, a subsidiary of Microsoft, over the deletion of his posts due to alleged violations of professional community policies.

Aggarwal explained the rationale behind this strategic move, citing the connection between LinkedIn’s ownership by Microsoft and Ola’s substantial reliance on Azure services. “Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big customer of Azure, we’ve decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own Krutrim cloud within the next week,” Aggarwal stated in a post on X.

In a bid to incentivize the transition, Aggarwal revealed that Krutrim Cloud would provide developers with a year of free cloud usage if they migrated from Azure, with a caveat against returning to Azure thereafter.

The decision to switch cloud providers comes in the wake of LinkedIn’s removal of Aggarwal’s posts, which centered on his criticisms of the platform’s use of neutral pronouns generated by its AI. Aggarwal expressed his disagreement with what he perceived as the imposition of “woke political ideology” by LinkedIn and its attempt to stifle dissenting voices.

Regarding the Krutrim Cloud, named after the Sanskrit word for “artificial,” Aggarwal shed light on its capabilities. This AI-powered platform has been trained extensively on over 2 trillion sub-words, enabling it to generate text with a deep understanding of Indian cultural nuances. Notably, Krutrim supports all 22 scheduled languages and offers generation capabilities for Hindi, English, and eight other Indian languages, aligning with Ola’s commitment to inclusivity and cultural relevance.