Google picks an unlikely Indian city for US$15 billion AI hub
The gigawatt-scale data centre will be in Visakhapatnam, far from India's established tech hubs.
Google today announced that it will invest US$15 billion in India, building its largest AI hub outside of the United States. The "gigawatt-scale" data centre will be in the port city of Visakhapatnam, in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh.
Upsized plans
I first wrote about this in August, when Reuters published a report citing two unnamed government sources with direct knowledge of the matter. More details came out at a Google event in New Delhi today, attended by the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh and Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.
Here's what we now know. It will be Google's largest AI hub outside the US, with a new international subsea gateway and large-scale energy infrastructure to support it.
Notably, while the current plan is to build a 1GW data centre campus, Kurian spoke of plans to scale it to "multiple gigawatts." The new data centre will be developed with partners AdaniConneX and Airtel. AdaniConneX will handle data centre infrastructure, while Airtel will develop subsea cables.
Why Andhra Pradesh
Why Andhra Pradesh, given it appears to have just a handful of small data centres and isn't a hub by any measure?
As I wrote in August, Andhra Pradesh under the new Chief Minister has finalised investments in data centres with a total capacity of 1.6GW, with plans to build 6GW over five years. That is astounding, considering there is just 1.4GW of data centres in operation across all of India. Visakhapatnam is also ideal for a subsea landing station.
Finally, Google has consistently demonstrated its penchant for unconventional locations that tick the right boxes. In this case, Andhra Pradesh's track record on renewables. Remember, Google acquired a massive plot of land at Port Dickson, Malaysia - far from Johor - and is reportedly building a water treatment plant and reservoir there.
Putting it in context
Cloud giants like Google build data centres on a global basis. Alphabet says it will spend US$75 billion this year alone to build up its data centre capacity.
In this case, the US$15 billion will be spent over five years and is likely inclusive of renewables and subsea infrastructure, based on previous reports. Moreover, India will also be part of a "global network" of AI data centres spanning 12 different countries.
Still, this development is notable, and the new data centre will dramatically ramp up cloud capacity in India.
