The Alphabet Inc. unit is one gigawatt data center facility to be located in Visakhapatnam, a port city. The southern Indian state’s officials had previously estimated the investment to be $10 billion.
In one of its largest-ever investments in India, Google said on Tuesday that it would spend $15 billion over the next five years to build data center capacity for an artificial intelligence powerhouse in Andhra Pradesh.
At an event in New Delhi, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said, “It is the biggest AI center that we are going to be investing in anyplace in the world outside of the U.S.”
The Alphabet Inc. unit is one gigawatt data center facility to be located in Visakhapatnam, a port city. The southern Indian state’s officials had previously estimated the investment to be $10 billion.
Big IT businesses are competing more fiercely and investing more in new data center infrastructure to accommodate the growing demand for AI services. Just Google has pledged to invest almost $85 billion this year to expand the capacity of data centers.
Due to AI’s high processing demands, there is a growing need for specialized data centers that allow IT firms to connect thousands of processors in clusters.
In India, where over a billion people have internet access, Microsoft and Amazon have already invested billions of dollars to create data centers.
In July, Reuters published the first news on Google’s ambitions. According to Reuters at the time, the search engine giant’s data center would have the biggest capacity and investment size in Asia. It is a part of a multibillion-dollar development of its data center portfolio across the region, which includes nations like Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.
According to state IT Minister Nara Lokesh, “such efforts will serve as a strategic edge in an era when data is the new oil.”