Google is making a $15 billion investment to set up a 1-gigawatt data center and AI hub in India, even as the Indian government pushes for reduced reliance on U.S. tech giants.
On Tuesday, Google said it would build the data center in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, in the port city of Visakhapatnam. The investment will take place over the next five years through 2030, the company added. Notably, this marks Google’s largest investment in India and comes five years after it first announced a $10 billion commitment to the South Asian nation in 2020.
Weeks after President Donald Trump imposed a 50% tariff on Indian imports in August, Prime Minister Narendra Modi began urging the use of “swadeshi” (Hindi for “made in India”) products. In response, Indian lawmakers and ministries started promoting local alternatives to Google — including those from Chennai-based enterprise tech firm Zoho Corporation, which offers competitors to Google Cloud and Gmail, and most recently, WhatsApp-rival Arattai, as well as MapMyIndia, a Google Maps-rival. While the initial impact has been limited, these moves could pose a real political threat to the future of companies 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 U.S., said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, adding that it would be scaled to “multiple gigawatts” over time.
“It is part of a global network of AI centers in 12 different countries,” Kurian said at the launch of the AI hub in New Delhi. “In addition to that, we’re also pleased to announce that we will be making Vishakhapatnam a global connectivity hub.”
Google also announced plans to bring its subsea cable infrastructure to Visakhapatnam. The U.S. 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 set up the infrastructure for the data center.
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“We see it not just becoming a landing station for a large number of cables, but also providing a digital backbone connecting different parts of India together,” Kurian said.
Google said the AI hub will offer a “full stack of solutions,” including its custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) 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.
“We see this hub not just serving India but from India serving Asia and other parts of the world,” Kurian said.
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.
“This AI hub will be a very important contribution to the [India] AI mission goals in different ways,” said Indian IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
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,” and assured the company of full government support. He also proposed linking Visakhapatnam with Sittwe, a city in Myanmar, to improve connectivity in India’s northeastern states.