Google To Invest $6 Bn To Build Data Centre In Andhra Pradesh

Big tech giant Google’s parent Alphabet is reportedly planning to invest $6 Bn to build a 1 gigawatt (GW) data centre and allied power infrastructure in Andhra Pradesh.

Sources told Reuters that the data centre will be built in the port city of Visakhapatnam. As per the report, the investment will also include a $2 Bn infusion towards renewable energy capacity that will power the upcoming facility.

Touted as Alphabet’s first such investment in India, the new unit will be the big tech major’s biggest data centre in Asia, both in terms of capacity as well as investment size.

Meanwhile, the state’s IT minister Nara Lokesh told Reuters, “We’ve made certain announcements like Sify (550-MW data centre to be built in the state), which are public… There are certain announcements which are not yet public. In October, we will make those announcements”.

Lokesh added that the state government has already finalised investments in data centres with a total installed capacity of 1.6 GW, adding that it aims to build 6 GW of data centres over the next five years.

He also said that the majority of the proposed data centres will run on green energy, adding that local authorities were anticipating a power generation capacity requirement of 10 GW over the next five years.

This comes at a time when the rise of GenAI has pushed big tech giants to invest billions of dollars in data centres to boost their cloud computing capacities. While Microsoft has committed to invest about $3.7 Bn in the cloud and AI infrastructure in India, Amazon plans to invest nearly $13 Bn in cloud infrastructure in the country by 2030.

In January this year, reports suggested that US investment giant BlackStone was planning to deploy $6 Bn for data centres in Maharashtra. Right after that, there were also reports that OpenAI had initiated talks to establish a data centre in the country.

In May, Japanese IT giant NTT DATA and AI cloud company Neysa Networks signed an agreement with the neighbouring Telangana government to set up an INR 10,500 Cr AI data centre cluster in Hyderabad.

Reliance Group, too, was said to be looking to build the world’s largest data centre, by capacity, at Gujarat’s Jamnagar with an anticipated capacity of 3 GW.

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