To introduce another significant addition to the digital and AI ecosystem in India, Google on Tuesday said that it will invest 15 billion dollars over the next five years to set up a 1-gigawatt data centre and artificial intelligence (AI) centre at Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. This will be the largest AI center in the United States that Google will establish since it is a historic move in the local technology sector
India is the location of the largest AI investment in Google outside the US
The new data centre campus will integrate AI infrastructure, renewable energy and extended fibre-optic network to operate next generation cloud and AI services. The project is meant to cater to the increasing data storage, computation and artificial intelligence applications in the Asian market
According to a signing ceremony in New Delhi, Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, said it is the biggest AI hub which they will be investing in anywhere around the globe, other than in the US
Kurian further explained that Visakhapatnam plant is meant to increase to many gigawatts in the future showing that Google has long term commitment to the growth of the Indian digital economy
High Level Attendance and National Assistance.
Top Indian leaders were also present at the announcement event, among which were the Union Ministers Nirmala Sitharaman and Ashwini Vaishnaw, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, and State IT Minister Nara Lokesh
Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw was pleased by the investment made by Google saying:
This digital infrastructure will be a long way to achieving the objectives of our India AI vision
It was dubbed as a very happy day by chief minister Chandrababu Naidu and termed by IT Minister Nara Lokesh as a game-changing investment that had been achieved after a year of hard negotiating and tireless work
It is an enormous jump in digital future, innovation and international position of our state, wrote Lokesh on X (formerly Twitter). “This is just the beginning.”
India: A New Age in Data and AI
It highlights how intense the competition between the major technological entities in the world, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI, has become as the companies are fast-growing their data infrastructure to meet the booming demand of AI-based services
Both Microsoft and Amazon have already put billions of dollars in the Indian data centre ecosystem, taking advantage of the growing Viet in terms of internet users who are expected to reach over 900 million by the end of 2025
In the meantime, OpenAI also will open its first office in India in the later part of the year. The recent comment made by the CEO, Sam Altman, is that the use of ChatGPT in India has increased fourfold within the last year, and the country is becoming increasingly interested in AI products and services
