India to get biggest data center investment outside of US with Google pledging $15 billion project (www.techradar.com)

Google announced a $15 billion investment to build a 1-gigawatt data center campus in Visakhapatnam, India — billed by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian as the largest AI hub the company will build outside the U.S. The five-year project is a partnership with Adani Group and Bharti Airtel and includes a new international subsea gateway to boost connectivity. Google says the campus will be one of Asia’s largest in both capacity and capital outlay, positioning India as a major regional node for AI compute and cloud services. For the AI/ML community this means substantially more regional capacity for large-scale training and low-latency inference, potential gains in data sovereignty and reduced network costs for India-based organizations. Technically, a 1 GW facility implies massive power draw and likely hundreds of thousands of accelerators (GPUs/TPUs) and dense networking to support distributed training workloads — reinforcing global demand for chips, fiber and cooling infrastructure. The move also intensifies the international AI data-center race (UAE, Saudi projects, Microsoft and Amazon expansions), and raises environmental and grid-impact questions: energy sourcing, local electricity prices and emissions will be central to how sustainable and socially acceptable such capacity growth proves.