Google on Tuesday said it will invest $15 billion in India over the next five years after announcing a massive data center and artificial intelligence base in the country.
“It’s the largest AI hub we’re investing in anywhere outside the US,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said at a ceremony in New Delhi.
Demand for AI tools and solutions is rising among businesses and individuals in India, which is expected to have more than 900 million internet users by the end of the year.
Kurian announced a “capital investment of $15 billion” over five years and a “gigawatt-scale AI hub in Visakhapatnam,” a port city in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh.
Google plans to scale up the center to multiple gigawatts, he added, likening the project to “a digital backbone connecting different parts of India.”
Globally, data centers are an area of phenomenal growth, fueled by the need to store massive amounts of digital data and train and operate energy-intensive AI tools.
Google chief Sundar Pichai said on X that he had spoken to Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the ‘milestone development’.
“This hub combines gigawatt-scale computing capacity, a new international subsea gateway and large-scale energy infrastructure,” he wrote.
“By doing so, we will bring our leading technology to businesses and users in India, accelerating AI innovation and driving growth across the country.”
‘Data is the new oil’
India’s Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw thanked Google for the investment.
“This digital infrastructure will go a long way in achieving the goals of our India AI vision,” he said.
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu called it a “very happy day”. State Minister for Technology Nara Lokesh said on X that the deal followed “a year of intense discussions and relentless efforts”.
Lokesh said at the announcement that “data is the new oil and data centers are the new refineries”.
“This is about India playing an important role in the global landscape,” he added.
Recently, top US AI companies looking for users in the world’s fifth-largest economy have made a flurry of announcements about expanding into the country.
This month, US startup Anthropic said it plans to open an office in India next year, where its CEO Dario Amodei will meet Prime Minister Modi.
Modi told Amodei in a post on
OpenAI has said it will open an office in India later this year, with its chief Sam Altman, noting that ChatGPT usage in the country has quadrupled in the past year.
