Google lays foundation for India AI hub in $15B investments

Google on Tuesday laid the foundation for India's artificial intelligence (AI) hub in southern India.

Indian Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw along with other senior officials attended the ceremony held in the city of Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh state.

"It's indeed a very significant start that we are doing. What is significant is the very short time frame on which everything has come to this stage today," Vaishnaw said.

Talking about the project, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, in a video message, said the AI Hub is a "strategic blueprint designed to fuel the government's Viksit Bharat 2047 vision."

Viksit Bharat is the Indian government's plan to transform India into a developed nation by the year 2047.

"We're deploying a full AI stack to empower every Indian consumer and every enterprise with immense compute power and the tools to lead the world," said Kurian.

"We're committed to investing in the local ecosystem to uplift business and entrepreneurs and advance skills development to create a sustainable future," he added.

According to Google, the hub "will combine powerful AI infrastructure, data center capacity, new large-scale energy sources and an expanded fiber-optic network, all in one place."

Last October, Google announced plans to build the first AI hub in India, pledging an investment of around $15 billion over five years.

Apart from Google, Microsoft last year also announced an investment in India. Its CEO Satya Nadella said it will invest $17.5 billion in India.