Alphabet’s Google intends to invest around $15 billion in building an artificial intelligence infrastructure center in southern India over the next five years, making its biggest bet on the fast-growing country.
The American company on Tuesday presented its plans for a data center in the port city of Visakhapatnam, connected to new energy sources and a fiber optic network. Indian tycoon Gautam Adani announced that his company, AdaniConneX, would partner with Google on the project, along with Bharti Airtel, the country’s second-largest mobile operator.
The project, Google’s largest investment in India to date, will consolidate the regional government’s plan to boost the AI industry locally, as stated by the American company. The Indian state of Andhra Pradesh aims to host 6 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2029, Nara Lokesh, the region’s technology minister, told Bloomberg News.
Google joins other American tech leaders in investing in India, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global AI boom. Amazon.com plans to invest US$12.7 billion to build cloud infrastructure in the South Asian country by 2030, while OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, seeks to establish a 1 gigawatt data center in the region. Investments in the country’s data center market are expected to exceed $100 billion by 2027, according to Cbre Group.
Lokesh said the Visakhapatnam data center alone represented an investment of more than $10 billion by Google.. “It’s not just about jobs,” said Lokesh, son of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu. “It’s about the broader ripple effect that it generates, the economic activity that it generates.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has praised technology as key to boosting the country’s economy and lifting millions out of poverty.. However, the country faces challenges that hinder its expansion ambitions, as limited water resources and precarious electricity service remain major bottlenecks.
Lokesh’s regional Telugu Desam Party, led by his father, is an important part of Modi’s plan. The Andhra Pradesh government offers subsidized land and power for new industrial ventures. In the late 1990s, Naidu earned a reputation as a visionary by helping transform his capital, Hyderabad, into a technology metropolis that today houses huge campuses of companies such as Microsoft and Oracle.
The party is now trying to leverage its influence to secure favorable federal policies. for companies investing in Andhra Pradesh.
“We are willing to have conversations that could even require political intervention at the federal level”Lokesh said, characterizing the strategy as a “double engine, bullet train.”
The AI center is “designed to provide a complete AI infrastructure and is designed to meet not only our own needsbut also the needs of entrepreneurs, companies and commercial organizations here in India,” Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, told reporters in New Delhi.
