‘AI is about transforming lives, not balance sheets’: Google India head Preeti Lobana
As competition for data centres and users of AI products heats up in India, Google will focus on staying ‘AI-first’ and invest in government initiatives and local AI startups, country manager Preeti Lobana said.
MUMBAI : Google is laying fresh digital rails across India’s artificial intelligence (AI) landscape. As the AI race heats up among both Indian companies and global giants, the Big Tech firm is betting on local capacity, new data centres, and partnerships with Indian startups and governments to anchor its next phase of growth, its top executive in the country said in an interview.
“AI gives us a tool to leapfrog ahead," said Preeti Lobana, country manager for Google India. “This is about transforming lives, not just balance sheets."
On 14 October, Google announced a $15-billion investment to set up a data centre and international subsea gateway in Visakhapatnam, connecting the coastal city to several global networks. The facility — part of Andhra Pradesh’s goal to reach 6GW of data centre capacity by 2029 — will be powered entirely by green energy, Lobana said.
“We have been talking to Chandrababu Naidu and Nara Lokesh for a good 13 months," Lobana said. “It is important for us that we are working with the ecosystem and doing work which is local." Naidu is the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, the state’s top administrator, and Lokesh is the state’s minister of human resources development and IT, electronics, communications.
Now, Lobana said, Google is focused on offering its AI capabilities—including Gemma, its light-weight open source family of LLMs—to local businesses and governments along with computing capacity and cloud credits (tokens for free access to the company’s cloud services).
Even as competition scales up from Indian and global majors, Lobana emphasised that Google is ahead in its AI ambitions as well as efforts to partner India’s central and local governments in expanding AI infrastructure.
“Everyone talks about AI, and that moment came into everyone's consciousness when the ChatGPT moment happened two-three years ago," Lobana said. “But when Sundar [Pichai] became the CEO of Google in 2015—and I joined Google in 2016—he said at that time, we are an AI-first company, when everyone was saying we are mobile first."
Google India now has 13,000 employees, including those involved in core engineering projects such as AI research lab Google DeepMind, Lobana said, but did not share details.
Competition amping up
Competition to invest in data centres and AI computing has been intensifying in India. Already, Tata Group, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, and the Adani Group have made commitments worth $28 billion in building data centres, outpacing Big Tech giants Google Microsoft and Amazon who have committed $25 billion so far, Mint reported earlier this month.
ChatGPT owner OpenAI has also begun expanding operations in India. This year, it set up an office in New Delhi and began hiring solutions engineers, sales personnel, and other staff already. CEO Sam Altman visited India in February and in August launched ChatGPT Go, a mid-tier subscription plan in India at ₹399/month. Earlier this month, the company announced one-year subscriptions for free to Indian users.
Further, Bloomberg reported in August that the company is in talks to open a 1GW data centre in the country.
Lobana, though, is unfazed. “There are others who have the models, or the chips. We are full stack," she said, likening these ongoing investments in expanding data centres to the laying of the electricity grid and railroad systems two centuries ago.
“We think a lot of this infrastructure investment as just laying down the foundation, because that compute is very critical as usage grows," Lobana said, adding that seven of Google’s products have more than 2 billion users, and 15 products have half a billion users each.
Google is focused on investing in computing capacity to support its most used consumer products—Search, Maps and, increasingly, Gemini, in its largest market by user base.
The company is also keen to keep investing in local AI startups along with offering them mentoring and coaching as part of the ministry of electronics and information technology’s Startup Hub, Lobana said. “We have some stakes [in Indian AI startups]. We have a fund for this here and lots of work is happening," Lobana said.
In September 2025, Google announced a list of 20 AI startups for its “AI First" accelerator program, ranging from agentic AI, voice and marketing tools, and health technology.
Market still developing
Despite Google’s enthusiasm and high decibel investment announcements, India’s data centres business has remained slow on the uptake.
“India generates 20% of global data, yet has only 5.5% of global DC capacity — and slower-than-desired capacity addition in the past has steepened the demand-supply mismatch, ushering in a cyclical boom in DC capacity expansion," analysts of the brokerage firm JM Financial wrote in detailed report in March. “A large internet user base generating troves of data, government’s data localisation push and AI are some of the structural tailwinds."
Besides, the analysts said, much of the ongoing expansion in data centres is to cater to domestic demand, but the country’s data centre business could boom if it were to become a connectivity hub for South Asia and the Middle East.
“Improving cross-border connectivity as more sub-sea cable landings come on stream, lower capex/MW, lesser operating cost (utilities, manpower, etc.) and its strategic location (between ME and SEA) give India an edge. Lower rack density even for AI workloads, as promised by DeepSeek, could push the scale further in India’s favour," the report said.
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