- Google plans to invest over $10 billion to build a 1-gigawatt data centre in Visakhapatnam
- The data centre aims to be operational within two years as part of Andhra Pradesh's 6-gigawatt target
- India's data centre market is projected to exceed $100 billion in investments by 2027
Alphabet Inc.'s Google is planning to invest more than $10 billion in southern India to set up a 1-gigawatt data center, marking one of its biggest bets in a market that's key to its global expansion plans.
The Google data center — scheduled to be built within two years in the port city of Visakhapatnam — is part of a broader goal set by the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to develop 6 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2029, Nara Lokesh, the region's technology minister, told Bloomberg News in an interview.
“It's not just about the jobs,” said Lokesh, the son of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu. “It's about the larger ripple effect that it creates, the economic activity it creates.”
India has emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of a worldwide data center boom, fueled by the demand for artificial intelligence systems. Amazon.com Inc. plans to invest $12.7 billion to build cloud infrastructure in the South Asian country by 2030, and ChatGPT maker OpenAI is seeking to set up a 1-gigawatt data center in the region. Investments in the country's data center market are expected to top $100 billion by 2027, according to CBRE Group Inc.
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi has hailed the technology as key to bolstering the country's economy and lifting millions out of poverty. But the nation is confronting challenges to his ambitions for a build-out, with limited water resources and unreliable electricity service remaining significant bottlenecks.
Lokesh's regional Telugu Desam Party, which his father leads, is a large part of Modi's plan. The government in Andhra Pradesh offers subsidized land and power for new industrial ventures. In the late 1990s, Naidu earned a reputation as a visionary as he helped transform his capital city of Hyderabad into a tech metropolis that today hosts huge campuses for the likes of Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp.
The party is now trying to leverage its influence to secure favorable federal policies for companies investing in Andhra Pradesh. “We are willing to have conversations which might even require policy intervention at the federal level,” Lokesh said, characterizing the strategy as a “double engine, a bullet train.”
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