Built on nine acres in this Indian city’s financial district, it is Amazon’s single largest building globally and the only Amazon-owned campus outside the US. It can house over 15,000 employees, but its size is its main architectural feature: it resembles the same cube of glass steel and chrome seen in corporate offices across Hyderabad, though a flash of magenta reflected in one of the top floor windows, from a billowing sari across the road, is a nice Indian touch.

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The building represents something of a coup for Hyderabad, and a milestone in the city’s quest to be a rival to Silicon Valley. A study this year from Oxford Economics predicted all the 10 fastest-growing cities by GDP between 2019 and 2035 will be in India; Hyderabad is growing fourth-fastest on that list, and after Bangalore it is the country’s second biggest technology hub.

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As well as a bustling economy and an educated software workforce, Amazon’s choice was also determined by the size of the almost virgin e-commerce market here.1

The world’s retail giants want some of that money. There are three main players: Amazon; Flipkart, an Indian firm acquired by Walmart last year for $16bn; and Reliance Retail, owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani.

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• 1. Billions of Indians still do their shopping locally: approximately 12m neighbourhood shops account for almost 90% of the country’s retail sales. Online shopping is minuscule. By 2022, however, India will have 829 million smartphone users, according to a report by Cisco Systems, and when they start shopping online, the demand for food, gadgets, clothes and music and online services is likely to explode: estimates put it at $200bn (£150bn) by 2028, up from about $30bn last year.