Ola Cabs, a major Indian transportation company, is migrating its workloads off of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The company is opting to move its entire workload to Krutrim, an Ola-owned artificial intelligence (AI) cloud venture.
The migration is a retaliation against Microsoft, after Ola CEO and founder Bhavish Aggarwal claimed that LinkedIn's AI was imposing a political ideology on his posts and deleting those that did not meet what Aggarwal describes as a "woke political ideology."
The post that was taken down criticized LinkedIn's AI for referring to Aggarwal as they/them as opposed to he/him. Aggarwal screenshotted this, and added the caption describing it as imposing a "political ideology on Indian users that is unsafe, sinister." This post was then deleted by LinkedIn, and reuploaded to X by Aggarwal.
DCD has contacted LinkedIn to find out if the model its AI is based on is, in fact, simply gender-neutral for convenience.
Aggarwal then posted a lengthy statement to X, describing the "pronouns issue" as a "woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong in India."
Aggarwal goes on to say: "Linkedin has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticize it. They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out."
The post closed by announcing that 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." Ola has been a customer of Azure since at least 2017.
Aggarwal is also offering other developers who leave Azure a full year of free cloud usage with the condition that they do not return to Azure after that. According to Aggarwal, more than 2,500 developers have taken advantage of this.
Ola successfully exited Microsoft Azure by May 22.
On May 30, The Economic Times reported that Ola would also be migrating its IT workloads from AWS cloud to Kutrim. In that report, ET quotes Aggarwal as stating that the exit from Azure has caused a daily revenue loss of Rs 5-25 lakh ($6,000 - $30,000), and that the AWS migration will see a loss of Rs 30-40 lakh ($36,000 - $48,000), in a post on X. That post has seemingly since been deleted.
DCD has contacted Microsoft, AWS, and Ola for comment.
