Google, Adani Group, Airtel team up for $15-bn AI hub

New Delhi: In its biggest ever investment in India, tech giant Google on Tuesday said it will invest $15 billion in building an AI infrastructure hub in Andhra Pradesh, which would include a gigawatt-scale data centre in partnership with Adani Group and Airtel. The project is expected to create 5,000–6,000 direct jobs and 20,000–30,000 total jobs in Andhra Pradesh. The AI hub at Visakhapatnam will be Google’s largest outside the US and will include a data centre fuelled by clean energy and a fiber-optic network. The announcement was made during Bharat AI Shakti, a Google-hosted event here which served as a precursor to the upcoming India-AI Impact Summit 2026.

Business tycoon Gautam Adani said his company AdaniConneX would partner with Google on the project, along with Bharti Airtel, India’s second largest mobile operator. The $15 billion will be invested over the next five years (2026-2030).

“It’s the largest AI hub that we are going to be investing in anywhere in the world outside of the US,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said at an event here to sign the formal agreement. Google joins a growing list of US tech giants ramping up investments in India amid the country’s accelerating AI boom. Amazon.com Inc has announced plans to invest $12.7 billion in cloud infrastructure by 2030, while OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is preparing to establish a 1-gigawatt data centre in the region. Microsoft is also expanding its data centre footprint in India, a key growth market with nearly a billion internet users.

Billionaires Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani have similarly announced significant investments to boost data centre capacity in the country. Analysts project India’s data centre market to top $100 billion by 2027. While Google has committed to spend about $85 billion this year to build out data centre capacity worldwide, the one planned at Visakhapatnam will have an initial capacity of 1 gigawatt (GW). In the Visakhapatnam hub, Adani Group and Airtel have partnered with Google to build the infrastructure for its new project, which also includes construction of a new international subsea gateway. The rapid advancement of AI, which demands massive computing power, is fuelling the need for high-performance data centres that connect thousands of chips into powerful computing clusters.

Commenting on the announcement, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a post on X said the multi-faceted investment “aligns with our vision to build a Viksit Bharat. It will be a powerful force in democratizing technology. It will also ensure AI for All, delivering cutting-edge tools to our citizens, boosting our digital economy and securing India’s place as a global technology leader!” He made the comment in reply to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s post on his conversation with Modi to share Google’s plans for the first-ever Google AI hub in Visakhapatnam.

Calling it a “landmark development”, Pichai said, “This hub combines gigawatt-scale compute capacity, a new international subsea gateway, and large-scale energy infrastructure. Through it we will bring our industry-leading technology to enterprises and users in India, accelerating AI innovation and driving growth across the country.”

Andhra Pradesh’s IT Minister Nara Lokesh said the state is aiming to host 6 GW of data centre capacity by 2029-30. The Visakhapatnam data centre alone represented an investment of more than $10 billion from Google and its partners. Separately, Adani Enterprises, the flagship firm of Gautam Adani’s conglomerate said its joint venture AdaniConneX, and Google will develop India’s largest AI data centre campus and new green energy infrastructure in Visakhapatnam.