Vizag to host Google’s largest AI hub' outside the US

Google on Tuesday announced a landmark USD 15 billion investment to establish a gigawatt-scale Artificial Intelligence (AI) hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, marking the company’s largest overseas investment. The announcement was made at the ‘Bharat AI Shakti’ event hosted in New Delhi, underscoring Google’s long-term commitment to positioning India as a global hub for AI innovation.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said the hub would serve India and the wider Asia-Pacific region, emphasizing that it will store data locally and power AI-driven solutions across multiple sectors. “This gigawatt-scale AI hub represents our vision for sustainable, locally integrated AI infrastructure, enabling India to lead in the digital and AI economy,” Kurian stated.

Gigawatt-scale hub and technology

The AI City Vizag project will include a 1 GW hyperscale data centre campus, integrating renewable energy, advanced cooling systems, and thousands of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and TPUs (Tensor Processing Units).

• GPUs and TPUs: Specialized processors essential for large-scale AI model training and inference, enabling parallel computation of massive datasets. While CPUs and other chips can supplement workloads, GPUs and TPUs are industry standards for hyperscale AI.

• Cooling Systems: To manage heat from continuous AI computations, the hub will use liquid cooling, immersion cooling, and potentially seawater-based cooling, which are critical for operational efficiency.

• Networking and Storage: High-speed fiber-optic networks will connect servers within and beyond the data center, while distributed storage systems will manage petabytes to exabytes of data, ensuring redundancy, security, and rapid AI processing capabilities.

Employment and skill development

Google projects that the AI hub will generate up to 1.8 lakh jobs, including direct and indirect employment:

• Direct employment (~25,000–30,000 jobs): Skilled roles in AI/ML engineering, cloud infrastructure, data science, cybersecurity, R&D, data center operations, and hardware maintenance. Salaries for these roles are expected to range from ₹5 lakh to ₹45 lakh annually, depending on experience and specialization.

• Indirect employment (~1.5 lakh jobs): Construction, logistics, renewable energy management, facility support, and vendor services, often project-based or medium-term with monthly pay ranging from ₹15,000 to ₹60,000.

Experts note that permanent high-skilled roles will largely go to trained professionals, emphasizing the need for government-backed skill development programs to ensure local youth benefit from this transformative project.

Government perspectives

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu recalled India’s vision of attracting global technology leaders. “Prime Minister Modi envisioned Google coming to India. We brought Microsoft to Hyderabad, and now Google is coming to Visakhapatnam. With this, we can achieve the vision of Viksit Bharat by 2047 using AI,” he said.

Union Minister for Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw highlighted the hub’s strategic significance for India’s AI Mission, noting its potential to boost the digital economy and IT skill development. He also suggested exploring opportunities in the Andaman Islands for undersea cable connectivity, reducing dependency on existing routes through Singapore.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman called the project “a reflection of harmony between progressive policymaking and dynamic governance,” stating that such initiatives demonstrate India’s readiness to lead the next wave of technological transformation.

Andhra Pradesh IT Minister Nara Lokesh emphasized that this collaboration positions India, not just Andhra Pradesh, as a leader in the global AI landscape.

Economic and strategic impact

The AI hub is expected to:

• Establish Visakhapatnam as a global AI innovation hub.

• Leverage clean energy integration, advanced cooling, and high-capacity networking.

• Enable the training and deployment of AI models at a continental scale, benefiting multiple sectors.

• Create a sizable employment ecosystem, ranging from high-skilled AI engineers to ancillary service providers.

The project’s combination of advanced hardware, energy sustainability, networking, and massive data storage capacity sets the stage for India to play a central role in global AI infrastructure. It also highlights the potential for the government and private sector to jointly foster skill development, technological innovation, and economic growth.