Google plans US$15 billion data centre hub in biggest India bet
The Indian state of Andhra Pradesh aims to host 6 gigawatts of data centre capacity by 2029
[NEW DELHI] Alphabet’s Google aims to invest about US$15 billion building an AI infrastructure hub in southern India over the next five years, making its biggest bet on the fast-growing country.
The US company outlined plans on Tuesday (Oct 14) for a data centre in the port city of Visakhapatnam linked to new energy sources and a fibre-optic network. Google’s biggest investment in India to date, the project will anchor the regional government’s plan to accelerate the AI industry locally, the US company said in a statement.
The Indian state of Andhra Pradesh aims to host 6 gigawatts of data centre capacity by 2029, Nara Lokesh, the region’s technology minister, told Bloomberg News.
Google joins fellow US tech leaders in investing in India, one of the biggest beneficiaries of a worldwide AI boom. Amazon.com plans to invest US$12.7 billion to build cloud infrastructure in the South Asian country by 2030, while ChatGPT-creator OpenAI is seeking to set up a 1-gigawatt data centre in the region. Investments in the country’s data centre market are expected to top US$100 billion by 2027, according to CBRE Group.
Lokesh said the Visakhapatnam data centre alone represented an investment of more than US$10 billion from Google. “It’s not just about the jobs,” said Lokesh, the son of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu. “It’s about the larger ripple effect that it creates, the economic activity it creates.”
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi has hailed technology as key to bolstering the country’s economy and lifting millions out of poverty. But the nation is confronting challenges to his ambitions for a build-out, with limited water resources and unreliable electricity service remaining significant bottlenecks.
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Lokesh’s regional Telugu Desam Party, which his father leads, is a large part of Modi’s plan. The government in Andhra Pradesh offers subsidised land and power for new industrial ventures. In the late 1990s, Naidu earned a reputation as a visionary as he helped transform his capital city of Hyderabad into a tech metropolis that today hosts huge campuses for the likes of Microsoft and Oracle.
The party is now trying to leverage its influence to secure favourable federal policies for companies investing in Andhra Pradesh.
“We are willing to have conversations which might even require policy intervention at the federal level,” Lokesh said, characterising the strategy as a “double engine, a bullet train.”
The AI hub is “designed to provide a full AI infrastructure, and it is designed to serve not just our own needs, but the needs of entrepreneurs, enterprises, and commercial organisations here in India,” Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, said at a news conference in New Delhi. BLOOMBERG
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