Google Breaks Ground on $15B India AI Hub in Visakhapatnam — First Gigawatt-Scale Campus Doubles Country's Compute Capacity (April 28, 2026)

Google on April 28, 2026 broke ground on its first gigawatt-scale AI hub at Tarluvada in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh — the construction phase of a $15 billion, five-year investment the company first announced in October 2025 and which Indian officials are calling the country's largest single foreign direct investment since independence.

What Happened

Google Cloud, alongside partners AdaniConneX and Bharti Airtel's Nxtra, formally laid the foundation stone for a three-campus, gigawatt-scale data center complex on the Andhra Pradesh coastline. AdaniConneX and Nxtra by Airtel will lead construction of the data center buildings and connecting power and fiber infrastructure; Google will deploy the AI compute and platform services on top. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw attended the groundbreaking ceremony, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed the launch on social media as aligned with the government's "Viksit Bharat" 2047 industrial vision.

The site is the anchor of a 5-year buildout running through 2030. Vaishnaw said the project would "transform Vizag into an AI hub" and used the occasion to push global tech firms to manufacture servers, GPUs, and chips inside India under the country's existing Semiconductor Mission.

Key Details

• $15 billion committed over 2026–2030, the largest investment Google has ever made outside the United States.
• Three data center campuses totaling roughly 1 gigawatt of compute capacity at full buildout — almost equal to India's entire current data center footprint of about 1.3 GW across every operator and city combined.
• Partnership structure: AdaniConneX (Adani Group's data-center JV) and Nxtra by Airtel handle construction and the physical plant; Google Cloud handles the AI services layer and connectivity to its global network.
• Located at Tarluvada in Visakhapatnam district, with sea-cable landing access and proximity to Andhra Pradesh's renewable energy corridors.
• Andhra Pradesh State IT Minister Nara Lokesh publicly described the deal as "India's single largest FDI investment since independence."

What Developers and Users Are Saying

Reaction across Hacker News, r/india, and r/IndiaSpeaks split along familiar lines. Indian developers and infrastructure engineers were broadly positive: comments emphasised that domestic gigawatt-scale capacity would finally let Indian startups train and serve frontier-class models without round-tripping data through Singapore or Virginia. Several pointed out that the Visakhapatnam coastline is one of the few sites in India that combines deep-water cable landings with available land at scale.

The skeptical thread, voiced loudest on X by independent climate and infrastructure analysts, focused on power and water — a 1 GW campus is a nontrivial draw on the local grid, and Andhra Pradesh's renewable mix is not yet large enough to fully cover it. Others questioned the geopolitics of routing more Indian data through US-headquartered cloud infrastructure even as the government pushes a domestic "sovereign AI" agenda. Adani Group's involvement also attracted predictable controversy among critics of the conglomerate.

What This Means for Developers

For Indian and South Asian developers, this is the most consequential single announcement of the cloud-AI era. Once the first campus comes online, Google Cloud's most demanding services — Vertex AI training, large-context Gemini inference, TPU pods, and Anthropic's Claude (via Google's $40 billion April 24 deal) — should become available in-region with sub-30 ms latency to most Indian metros. That removes one of the biggest practical barriers to building serious AI products from India: data residency and round-trip cost.

Foreign developers serving Indian customers will see fewer compliance headaches around the Digital Personal Data Protection Act once Google's local region grows. Hardware suppliers — particularly NVIDIA, AMD, and Indian server-OEM aspirants — should expect rising procurement orders, and the government is openly trying to tie that demand to local manufacturing through the Semiconductor Mission.

What's Next

Google says first compute capacity at the Visakhapatnam site is expected to come online in 2027, with full buildout running through 2030. Three milestones to watch: (1) the first cable landing at the campus, expected later in 2026; (2) the first Vertex AI / TPU general availability announcements pinned to a Visakhapatnam region; and (3) follow-on procurement deals with Indian server and chip suppliers under the Semiconductor Mission. Google's official India AI Hub page on the company blog is the canonical source for build progress.

Sources

• Google blog — Google AI Hub: Scaling India's AI Infrastructure — primary announcement and partnership terms
• Google Cloud Press Corner — official press release
• Business Standard — Vaishnaw remarks and Semiconductor Mission framing
• Business Today — "single largest FDI" framing from State IT Minister
• TipRanks — partner-side disclosure with capacity details
• Mobigyaan — independent capacity comparison vs. India's existing 1.3 GW