Zoho Says It Built Its Own Cloud From Scratch To Rival Google & AWS, Is Now Offering It Free To Students

Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu said the company built its own cloud infrastructure instead of relying on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. Zoho developed databases, identity, messaging, search, storage and compute in-house. Its infrastructure is now offered to outside developers through Catalyst, while Zoho plans to make the serverless platform completely free for students across India.

Zoho founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu | IANS Image

Zoho co-founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu says the company chose to build its own cloud infrastructure rather than depend on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. In a post on X, he said the effort began early in Zoho's history, to run the company's own applications. Zoho built the core pieces itself, including databases, identity, messaging, search, storage and compute. Sridhar Vembu says the company skipped AWS and Google Cloud, and is now opening its in-house infrastructure to outside developers.

Opened to developers through Catalyst

Zoho has since made this infrastructure available as Catalyst, its serverless platform. Catalyst began as a tool for developers to extend Zoho's applications. Vembu said developers outside the Zoho ecosystem are now using it too.

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Zoho is increasing its investment in Catalyst and will make it free for students. Vembu said the aim is to let them build and deploy real applications without worrying about infrastructure bills. He framed the broader goal as giving developers the infrastructure to turn ideas into products. The post did not say when the student offer starts or how it will work.

Where Zoho's data lives

The announcement echoes claims Vembu made in a September 2025 post on where Zoho's software is built and hosted. He said all Zoho products are developed in India and that its global headquarters is in Chennai. The company has offices in more than 80 countries, including a large presence in the US.

On data, he said Indian customer data is stored in India. At the time of that post, Zoho had data centres in Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, with another planned in Odisha. The company runs more than 18 data centres worldwide and hosts data according to each country or region.

Vembu said Zoho's services run on hardware it owns and software frameworks it developed, on top of open-source tools such as Linux and the Postgres database. He added that Zoho does not host its products on AWS or Azure. Services from large cloud firms may be used for regional switching nodes to speed up traffic, he said, but customer data is not stored there. Zoho is also adding more points of presence in other locations.

Caution on AI-written code

Vembu has also commented on the growing use of AI coding tools. Replying to a developer who described a workplace where specifications, code and tests were being produced with Claude Code, he said he tells Zoho's engineers to use AI but 'never cede our understanding to AI'. He said the software industry is moving too fast on AI, likening it to driving a powerful new car that few people yet know how to handle. He warned this could cause problems if developers stop understanding the systems they build.

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