Add MobiGyaan as a preferred source on GoogleGoogle broke ground on what is, by some distance, the largest piece of digital infrastructure ever built in India. A $15 billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam, built in partnership with the Adani Group and Bharti Airtel, sprawling across 600 acres in three different villages, with three new subsea cables fanning out into the Bay of Bengal, capable of running close to a gigawatt of AI compute.
To put that last number in perspective: India’s entire current data centre capacity, across every operator, every city, is roughly 1.3 gigawatts. Google is building almost that much on a single coastline.
This is not “another data centre announcement.” Let’s get into why.
What Just Happened
The foundation stone went down at Tharluwada, a village on the outskirts of Vizag, with Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu and Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw doing the honours. State IT Minister Nara Lokesh, who has been working this deal since September 2024, was front and centre. Senior leaders from Google, Adani, and Airtel were there.
What Google announced is a five-year build-out (2026 through 2030) covering three things at once:
A massive data centre campus, actually three campuses spread across Tharluwada, Adavivaram, and Rambilli, with combined capacity approaching 1 gigawatt. AdaniConneX — Adani Group’s joint venture with American firm EdgeConneX — is doing the physical build. Power systems, transmission lines, energy storage, the buildings themselves.
A new international subsea cable gateway at Visakhapatnam. This is a bigger deal than the data centres in some ways, and we’ll come back to it.
Google’s full AI stack, deployed in India for the first time at this scale. The same compute that powers Search, YouTube, Workspace, and Gemini globally will run out of Vizag.
Airtel’s Nxtra is the third partner, handling fibre, 5G integration, and operational support. Three companies, clearly defined roles, no awkward overlap.
The Subsea Cable Story Nobody Is Talking About
For the last 20 years, India’s international internet has run through two coastal pinch points: Mumbai on the west coast, and Chennai on the south-east. Almost every cable that connects India to the rest of the world lands at one of those two cities. When Mumbai’s cables get damaged — which happens, occasionally because of trawlers, occasionally because of construction, and once memorably because of a ship’s anchor — large parts of the country’s enterprise internet wobble.
Google is fixing this. Three new subsea cables are part of the project:
- One running from Vizag to South Africa, then onward to the United States.
- One connecting Vizag to Singapore, then Australia, then the US West Coast.
- A third (landing at Mumbai, not Vizag) connecting Mumbai to Western Australia.
Together they’re going to plug into Google’s existing 2-million-mile global cable network. For Google, this is routing diversity it has wanted in India for a decade. For India, it’s the first new international internet gateway since Chennai. For users — anyone using Gmail, YouTube, or Google Cloud — it’s faster everything, and meaningfully better resilience when something goes wrong on the existing routes.
This is the part of the announcement that will still matter in 2030, long after the data centre numbers have been eclipsed by some new megaproject.
The Numbers, In One Place
Because the announcement has a lot of figures floating around and most articles are scattering them, here they are in one block:
- $15 billion total investment over 2026–2030
- 1 gigawatt of compute capacity at the Vizag hub (vs. 1.3 GW for all of India today)
- 6.5 gigawatts — Andhra Pradesh’s longer-term state-wide compute target, anchored by this project
- 600 acres across three villages
- 200,000 jobs projected (direct and indirect) per the AP government
- 3 subsea cables, two landing at Vizag, one at Mumbai
- 2 million miles of existing Google global network the new cables plug into
- 1.5 million Indians already trained by Google through Cloud Boost, Gemini Academy, and Grow with Google over the last three years
Why Vizag, Of All Places
This is the question I had reading the announcement. Hyderabad and Chennai are India’s established data centre cities. Vizag has been a port town with a navy base and a steel plant. So why here?
Three reasons, basically.
Geography. Vizag faces the Bay of Bengal at exactly the angle you want for cables routing to South-East Asia, Australia, and the US West Coast. Mumbai’s landings are saturated and physically congested. Chennai is full. Vizag was a clean slate in a strategically excellent location.
Politics and process. Naidu’s government has been aggressive in chasing this kind of investment, and Lokesh — who’s the CM’s son and runs IT — has been working Google for nearly two years. The state’s “speed of doing business” framework reportedly cleared regulatory hurdles in months that would normally take years. Tech companies notice this stuff.
Power. AI training is brutally power-hungry. A 1 GW data centre needs roughly the electricity output of a mid-sized power plant, running 24/7, for years. Adani’s separate commitment to bring new renewable generation online in Andhra Pradesh — solar, wind, plus storage — gave Google a clean-energy story it would have struggled to put together in most other Indian states. Jeet Adani put it well at the ceremony: “The cost of intelligence is directly linked to the cost of power.”
What This Means For You
If you’re reading this on your phone, you’re probably wondering what any of this changes for you. A few honest answers:
In the short term: not much. Construction on this scale takes years. The first subsea cables will probably land in 2027 or 2028. The data centres will come online in phases through 2030.
In the medium term: Google services in India get faster and more reliable. YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Search, Gemini — all of these will have more compute close to you, on better cables, with route diversity. Less buffering, fewer outages.
For developers and businesses: this is the bigger story. Indian startups currently doing serious AI work are mostly renting compute from servers physically located in Singapore, Taiwan, or the US. Latency matters. Data residency matters. Costs matter. Having a full Google AI stack physically inside India changes the math for every company building AI products here.
For the country: this is the kind of investment that compounds. Vizag is going to attract ancillary businesses — power infrastructure firms, cooling specialists, fibre contractors, training institutes, AI startups. The way Bengaluru’s IT ecosystem grew around its first IT parks in the 1990s, you can plausibly imagine an AI cluster forming around this hub over the next decade.
The Bigger Pattern
It’s worth zooming out for a second. In the last 18 months, every major Western hyperscaler — Microsoft, AWS, Meta, now Google — has announced significant Indian data centre expansions. The Indian government’s parallel push on semiconductor manufacturing in Gujarat, OSAT facilities, and 6G research has clearly built credibility with these companies that simply did not exist five years ago.
Ashwini Vaishnaw, at the ceremony, predicted Vizag would soon be known as “AI-patnam,” and pointed to India’s electronics manufacturing transformation over the past decade as the template. Ten years ago, India barely assembled phones. Today it makes most of the iPhones sold in the country. The bet is that AI infrastructure is the next chapter of that same story.
Whether that bet pays off depends on what comes after Google. If the next two or three hyperscalers follow with similarly ambitious projects, India’s positioning as a serious AI infrastructure destination becomes credible globally. If they don’t, Vizag will still be impressive, but it’ll be an outlier rather than a blueprint.
For now, on 600 acres of coastal Andhra that was largely farmland six months ago, the largest AI infrastructure project in Indian history has officially started to rise. We’ll be watching this one closely.
