Google to invest $15 billion in setting up AI hub in Visakhapatnam; CEO Sundar Pichai speaks to PM Narendra Modi

Google has announced plans to invest $15 billion over the next five years in setting an artificial intelligence hub in Visakhapatnam. The company made the announcement at an event in New Delhi today. On the occasion, Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke to PM

Narendra Modi

. "Great to speak with India PM @narendramodi @OfficialINDIAai to share our plans for the first-ever Google AI hub in Visakhapatnam, a landmark development.

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," wrote Pichai in a post on Twitter.While speaking at the event, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that the new AI hub will combine AI infrastructure, new data centre capacity, large energy scale sources and expanded optical fibre network. He also stated "We are incredibly proud of what today stands for. Google has been in India for a long time. It's our 21st year here. We have 14,000 people working for us across five locations, and we launched our cloud solutions in India several years ago. We also have two regions, New Delhi and Mumbai, and manufacture our devices here,".The AI hub will offer a full stack of solutions using Google's proprietary TPUs (Processing Units), which are twice as power-efficient. Data will be housed locally to meet sovereign AI requirements, and Google will deploy its own models, including Gemini, Imagine, and Veo."The hub is designed to provide full AI infrastructure to serve not just our own needs but also the needs of entrepreneurs, enterprises, and commercial organizations in India," Kurian said.