Google Announces AI Hub In India, Its Largest Outside the US
Google announced its upcoming investment of $15 billion in India over the next five years to build a giant data center and AI base. The announcement was made on Tuesday, stating that the AI hub will be built in Andhra Pradesh, the largest AI hub of the company outside the US.
The tech giant is planning to build a 1-gigawatt data center campus in the port city of Visakhapatnam by combining large-scale energy resources, AI infrastructure, and an expanded fiber-optic network.
Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud, said during an event in Delhi, “It’s the largest AI hub that we are going to be investing in anywhere in the world outside of the US.” He also stated that Google has plans for the AI hub to scale to multiple gigawatts in the future.
Union Ministers Nirmala Sitharaman and Ashwini Vaishnaw, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, and state IT Minister Nara Lokesh also attended the event on Tuesday, where Vaishnaw appreciated Google for its investment in India.
“This digital infrastructure will go a long way in meeting the goals of our India AI vision,” Vaishnaw said.
Lokesh said that the deal is a game-changing investment that comes after a year of intense discussion and consistent efforts. “It is a massive leap for our state’s digital future, innovation, and global standing,” he wrote on X.
The move comes amid the intensifying competition among the tech leaders spending heavily to build new data center infrastructures to meet the increasing demand for AI in the future.
Microsoft and Amazon are also spending billions to build their data centers in India, with a projection to have more than 900 million internet users by the end of this year.
OpenAI has also talked about opening its office in India after Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, noted that the number of ChatGPT users has grown fourfold over the past year.
