Google is set to invest $15 billion in establishing an artificial intelligence hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, making it the largest such investment outside of the United States. “This will be the largest AI hub we are creating anywhere globally outside the US,” stated Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, during an event in New Delhi on Tuesday.
The Alphabet Inc. subsidiary’s project will feature a 1-gigawatt data center campus situated in the port city of Visakhapatnam. Previously, officials from the southern Indian state had estimated the investment to be around $10 billion.
This initiative comes amidst escalating competition among major tech firms, which are heavily investing in new data center infrastructure to address the surging demand for AI services. Google alone has pledged around $85 billion this year for expanding its data center capacity.
The demands of AI necessitate substantial computing power, leading to an increased need for specialized data centers that allow tech companies to connect thousands of chips in clusters. Microsoft and Amazon have already invested billions in constructing data centers across India, a crucial growth market for these global tech leaders, where nearly a billion people access the internet.
In July, Reuters was the first to report on Google’s plans. The data center will have the highest capacity and investment scale in Asia and is part of a multi-billion-dollar expansion of its data center operations throughout the region, including in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, according to earlier reports by Reuters.
