Google is making a 15 billion dollar investment to establish a one gigawatt data center and AI hub in India. This move comes even as the Indian government promotes reduced reliance on US tech giants. On Tuesday, Google stated it would build the data center in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, specifically in the port city of Visakhapatnam. The investment will be distributed over the next five years through 2030. This marks Google’s largest investment in India and arrives five years after the company first announced a 10 billion dollar commitment to the South Asian nation in 2020.
Weeks after President Donald Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Indian imports in August, Prime Minister Narendra Modi began urging the use of swadeshi products, a Hindi term meaning made in India. In response, Indian lawmakers and ministries started promoting local alternatives to Google. These alternatives include services from Chennai based enterprise tech firm Zoho Corporation, which offers competitors to Google Cloud and Gmail, as well as the WhatsApp rival Arattai and the Google Maps rival MapMyIndia. While the initial impact of this push has been limited, these moves could pose a real political threat to the future of companies like Google and Microsoft in India.
Google has 14,000 employees in India and has operated in the country for 21 years. The company also counts Delhi and Mumbai as official cloud regions. The new Google AI hub will be the company’s largest investment outside of the US, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. He added that it would be scaled to multiple gigawatts over time. Kurian announced at the hub’s launch in New Delhi that it is part of a global network of AI centers in 12 different countries. He also stated that Google will make Visakhapatnam a global connectivity hub.
Google also announced plans to bring its subsea cable infrastructure to Visakhapatnam. The US tech giant has partnered with Indian telecom provider Bharti Airtel to build both the data center and the cable landing station in the city. Further, Google has teamed up with Adani Group backed AdaniConneX to establish the infrastructure for the data center. Kurian said the vision is for Visakhapatnam to become a landing station for a large number of cables and to provide a digital backbone connecting different parts of India together.
Google stated the AI hub will offer a full stack of solutions, including its custom Tensor Processing Units to enable local AI processing. The Mountain View based company will also provide access to its AI models, including Gemini, and its platform for building agents and applications. The hub will additionally support consumer services such as Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Ads. Kurian said the company sees this hub not just serving India, but from India serving Asia and other parts of the world.
Google’s choice of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh is not surprising. The southern state, under Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, has previously attracted global tech firms like Oracle and Microsoft to set up hubs in Hyderabad, which was Andhra Pradesh’s capital before the creation of Telangana. Naidu, a key political ally who supported Prime Minister Modi’s return to power in the last general election, has since played a prominent role in shaping national policy discussions.
Indian IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said this AI hub will be a very important contribution to the India AI mission goals. The minister urged Google to consider India’s Andaman Islands as the next major hub for global internet data transfer, noting that Singapore is all choked. He assured the company of full government support and also proposed linking Visakhapatnam with Sittwe, a city in Myanmar, to improve connectivity in India’s northeastern states.