Google will invest $15 billion over five years to set up an artificial intelligence data centre in India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh, a company official said on Tuesday, for its biggest ever investment in the world’s most populous nation.
Google has committed to spending some $85 billion this year to build out data centre capacity as big tech companies spend heavily on building new data centre infrastructure as they compete to fill booming demand for AI services.
“It’s the largest AI hub that we are going to be investing in anywhere in the world outside of the United States,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said at a New Delhi event, adding that investment will be spread over the next five years.
“It is a part of a global network of AI centres in 12 different countries.”
The data centre campus in the port city of Visakhapatnam will have a capacity of 1 gigawatt initially, but will be scaled to “multiple gigawatts”, Kurian added.
Earlier, state officials had estimated the investment at $10 billion for the centre, which the state government has said is expected to generate 188,000 jobs.
Microsoft and Amazon have already poured billions into building data centres in India, a key growth market, in which nearly a billion users access the internet.
Indian billionaires Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani have also unveiled investments in building capacity for data centres.
AI requires enormous computing power, pushing demand for specialised data centres, enabling tech companies to link thousands of chips together in clusters.
Google parent Alphabet counts India as a key growth market where its YouTube video services have the most users, and Android phones dominate smartphone usage.
However, the US giant has been battling many antitrust challenges in India over its business practices, and also faces a lawsuit from a Bollywood couple challenging YouTube’s AI policy.
