Google to invest $15B in Indian AI infrastructure hub (techcrunch.com)

Google announced a $15 billion investment to build a 1‑gigawatt data center and AI hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, to be developed through 2030 — Google’s largest-ever investment in India and its biggest outside the U.S. The hub will include a subsea cable landing station (in partnership with Bharti Airtel), infrastructure from AdaniConneX, and is designed to scale to “multiple gigawatts” over time. Technically, the facility will provide a full AI stack: on‑prem TPUs for local model training/inference, access to Google’s models including Gemini, tooling for building agents and applications, and continued support for consumer services (Search, YouTube, Gmail, Ads). Google also positions Visakhapatnam as a global connectivity hub linking cables and regional networks. For the AI/ML community this is significant because it materially expands local compute capacity, reduces latency for model development and deployment in Asia, and increases access to high‑performance accelerators and pretrained models within Indian jurisdiction. The move strengthens India’s role as an AI infrastructure node but arrives amid a political push for “swadeshi” (homegrown) alternatives and scrutiny of U.S. cloud providers; that introduces both opportunity (ecosystem growth, talent localization) and risk (policy pressure favoring local competitors such as Zoho, MapMyIndia, Arattai). Partnerships with Airtel and AdaniConneX and existing Google cloud regions in Delhi and Mumbai suggest rapid integration into India’s digital backbone.