Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Saturday said that his company had decided to move its entire workload out of Microsoft Azure to its own cloud platform, Krutrim, within the next week. The move is a reaction to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn removing Mr Aggarwal’s post on ‘pronoun illness’, in which he called out the platform for imposing a ‘forced ideology’ over gender pronouns.

Reportedly, this move will lead to a loss of over Rs 100 crore for Microsoft in India as Ola is a big customer. “It (shifting operations from Azure to Krutrim) is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this,” Mr Aggarwal posted on social media platform X. He also threw an invitation to other developers, saying if they wanted to move out of Azure, “we will offer a full year of free cloud usage as long as you don’t go back to Azure after that!”

In 2017, Ola had partnered with Microsoft Azure to build a new connected-vehicle platform for car manufacturers worldwide. Azure came on board as a cloud services provider for Ola. In FY23, Microsoft’s revenue from India operations rose by 39 per cent year on year to Rs 19,230 crore.

Krutrim is a made-in-India generative AI platform that was launched by Mr Aggarwal last year. Recently, Krutrim launched AI cloud services called Krutrim Cloud to help developers and enterprises access advanced GPU resources to accelerate their projects and improve productivity.

“The pronouns issue I wrote about is a woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong in India… Clearly Linkedin has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticise it. They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out,” Mr Aggarwal said.

The issue has also sparked a debate around monopolies of Big Tech firms in owning social media platforms, along with the ongoing issue of their monopolies in the Play Store market. On similar lines, Mr Aggarwal said that he would work with Indian developers to build a DPI (digital public infrastructure) social media framework.