Vaishali Kastur, the Amazon executive appointed as interim head of AWS for India and South Asia, has resigned from the company, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, just seven months after assuming the top job.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment via email and phone. Amazon considers India one of its key markets for AWS, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of companies in the world’s second-largest Internet market and has included several government projects.
Additionally, the e-commerce giant said in May this year that it plans to invest $12.7 billion in its cloud business in India by 2030, an amount of capital unmatched by competitors. To put things in perspective, the total public cloud services market in India is expected to reach just $13 billion by 2026, according to IDC.
Castor, who joined Amazon about five years ago, served as interim business leader for AWS India and South Asia starting June this year. The reason for her departure cannot be known.
She was elevated to the top job after her predecessor Puneet Chandok abruptly left the company and jumped ship to take up the top job at Microsoft India. Even a couple of weeks ago, Castor was excited and optimistic about the growth prospects and momentum of Amazon Web Services in India.
“Our total planned investments in India will be over $16.4 billion or 1.36 lakh crore by 2030, and we expect this to contribute $23 billion to India’s GDP by then,” she added. he wrote in a post on LinkedIn.
“In addition to investments in infrastructure and services, we are also investing in people and skills, and AWS has trained more than 4 million people in India through various education and training programmes.”