India creating ‘amazing flywheel’ in open source: Microsoft’s Asha Sharma

Bengaluru: Asha Sharma, now elevated as CEO of Microsoft Gaming, told TOI ahead of Microsoft’s flagship Ignite event in November last year—when she was president of product and development at CoreAI—that India was becoming increasingly central to Microsoft’s AI ecosystem, particularly from a developer standpoint.

“That creates an amazing flywheel—better open-source models, better tooling, and stronger ecosystem contributions,” she said. “India was great both in open-source volume and contributions. It was wonderful to see India lead.” According to GitHub’s State of the Octoverse Report 2025, India’s developer ecosystem is expanding at an unprecedented pace. “We added more than 5 million developers in 2025—about 14% or 15% of all new GitHub developers worldwide were from India,” Sharma said.

The country now has over 21.9 million developers building on GitHub, with 5.2 million joining in the past year alone—accounting for more than 14% of all new GitHub accounts globally.

That translates to over 1 million new developers every quarter, the highest addition by any country in the world, marking a 31% year-on-year growth—the fastest annual growth rate ever recorded for India. India is now GitHub’s largest source of new developers and its second-largest developer community, and is projected to become the world’s largest within 5 years, with over 57.5 million developers by 2030.

Sharma said companies in India are leveraging Azure AI and Microsoft Foundry, using pretrained models, ML Studio and GitHub Copilot within their own cloud environments to deliver low-latency, data-sovereign AI services.

She also said there was an explosion of foundation models pushing the efficient frontier, making them not only more capable but also more accessible as the cost per GPU became increasingly affordable.

General-purpose technologies like AI, Sharma said, lower the floor so more people can become creators and makers—and raise the ceiling. “Developers are now capable of doing much more. Their role is not just writing code—it’s driving intent,” she said.

“When you look back at every platform shift, there were more jobs created, not fewer.” She added that economics and the way software is written are reshaping, requiring a new set of tools and capabilities to empower not only every developer, but every individual to be a maker.