Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal snaps ties with Microsoft Azure, to move to Krutrim Cloud

Following the removal of Bhavish Aggarwal's LinkedIn post that stated India doesn't need 'they/them' or special pronouns, the Ola founder said his company will move its entire workload out of LinkedIn-owner Microsoft's Azure, within the next week, to its AI company Krutrim's cloud infrastructure.

Aggarwal said in a post on X on Saturday, "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. It is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this."

He also said that any other developer looking to move out of Azure will be offered a full year of free cloud usage on Krutrim, provided they do not return to Azure after the year is up.

LinkedIn had removed Aggarwal's recent viral post on its platform that criticised its AI chatbot for using gender-neutral 'they/them' pronouns. The founder of Ola Cabs and Ola Electric had said in this post that gender-neutral pronouns were an "illness", and that Indian culture has always had respect for all.

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LinkedIn had marked the post "unsafe" and removed it from the platform, prompting the founder to rally against the company saying, "This is exactly why we need to build own tech and AI in India. Else we'll just be pawns in others political objectives."

In his recent post on X, Aggarwal qualified his stance on gender-neutral pronouns by saying Ola is for "genuine actions on diversity", referring to the 5,000-women-strong team that works at Ola's automotive plant.

His post comes mere days after the public launch of Krutrim's AI and cloud infrastructure services. During the launch, the company announced its provision of graphics processing units (GPU)-as-a-service on Krutrim Cloud, catering to developers and businesses seeking to develop and train their AI models.

On Saturday, Aggarwal also committed to working with the Indian developer community to build a digital public infrastructure social media framework, like UPI and ONDC.

"The only 'community guidelines' should be the Indian law. No corporate person should be able to decide what will be banned," he said.

Aggarwal also expressed concern about Western "Big Tech monopolies".

"As an Indian citizen, I feel concerned that my life will be governed by western Big Tech monopolies and we will be culturally subsumed ...," he said.