Google to invest $15 billion in AI data centre in Andhra

Bengaluru: Google will invest $15 billion over the next five years to set up data centre capacity for an artificial intelligence hub in India's Andhra Pradesh, the company said on Tuesday, marking one of its biggest ever investments in the country.

"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 a New Delhi event.

The 1-gigawatt data centre campus by the Alphabet Inc unit will be based in the port city of Visakhapatnam. Officials from the southern Indian state earlier put the investment at $10 billion. 

The move comes amid intensifying competition among big tech companies, which are spending heavily on building new data centre infrastructure to meet booming demand for AI services. Google alone has committed to spending some $85 billion this year to build out data centre capacity.

AI requires enormous computing power, pushing demand for specialised data centres that enable tech companies to link thousands of chips together in clusters.

Microsoft and Amazon have already poured billions into building data centres in India, a key growth market for the global tech giants, where nearly a billion users access the internet. 

Reuters first reported on Google's plans in July. The search giant's data centre will be the largest in terms of capacity and investment size in Asia. It is part of a multi-billion-dollar expansion of its data centre portfolio across the region, including countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, Reuters reported at the time.

"In an era where data is the new oil, such initiatives will serve as a strategic advantage," state IT Minister Nara Lokesh said.