A few days after POTUS’s remarks about India and its economy, one of America’s biggest companies, Alphabet or Google, has pledged $6 billion to develop a 1-GW data centre and its power infrastructure in the Southern state of India, Andhra Pradesh, government sources told Reuters. This marks Alphabet’s first investment in an Indian data centre. Proposed to be built in the port city of Visakhapatnam, Google’s investment includes $2 billion to develop renewable energy capacity for powering the whole facility.
The data centre will be the largest in Asia in terms of capacity and investment size, and is a part of Google’s plans to expand its data centre portfolio in the region with more data centres in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. In April, Google announced its commitment to invest a whopping $75 billion in data centres around the world, despite the trade and investment uncertainties resulting from the tariff war initiated by President Donald Trump.
The state of Andhra Pradesh welcomes this investment with open arms, as the state is looking to make itself the regional hub for data centres. The information technology minister of the state, Nara Lokesh, said, “We’ve made certain announcements like Sify, which are public. There are certain announcements which are not yet public. In October, we will make those announcements.” He is referring to a 550 MW data centre Sify Technologies plans to build in Andhra Pradesh.
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Andhra Pradesh and its leaders have previously said that they want the state to be a regional hub for data centers. Lokesh said that the state has already attracted investment for data centres with a total capacity of 1.6 GW and wants to take this number to 6 GW in the next five years.
