New Delhi: In late 2024, a team of engineers from Google travelled to Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh—a place once known for its clean beaches, fishing villages and shipyards—to explore the viability of setting up a large data centre facility in India.
Less than 12 months later, on 14 October 2025, Google unveiled its $15-billion, 1 gigawatt (GW) data centre project in the area in partnership with Adani Enterprises and Bharti Airtel—a feat that a top company executive said is proof of rising ease of business in India’s data centre economy.
In an interview with Mint, Alexander Smith, principal for global infrastructure, Asia-Pacific at Google, said that a “single window mechanism” operated by Indian government bodies, both at state and Centre, helped the company expedite setting up of what is Google’s largest data centre outside the US.
“From visiting the site in late 2024, we accelerated to announcing the project in October 2025. By April this year, we broke ground on our factory. A lot of the legal process was possible due to India’s single window approval mechanism for land, power and a host of associated clearances—this allowed us to seek approval for multiple things at the same time and move really fast. For data centres, it doesn’t get any faster than this, even if you consider mature geographies such as Singapore,” the executive said.
The ease of business that Smith referred to include smooth land and power resource approvals, and the ability to source IT hardware and cooling solutions readily from within the country.
Google, however, faces a potential speed bump ahead. On 24 August, though the Andhra Pradesh high court refused to stall construction of the Vizag data centre, it asked the state government to produce all due paperwork for the project before the court. The pace of the project, therefore, could depend on what comes next.
Nevertheless, Smith affirmed that the region remains one that Google “intends to build as an AI corridor in India—before looking to develop other sites around the country”.
Other facilities, to be sure, could be on the cards. On 8 July, Thomas Kurian, global chief executive of Google Cloud, told Mint in an interview that the company “will look at setting up more data centres beyond the currently planned one—as demand builds”.
Industry stakeholders, however, said that the “AI corridor” impact could be Google’s biggest contribution to the region.
“There are few companies with the kind of strategic pull and importance as Google, in the AI era,” said Jayanth Kolla, partner at AI consultancy and services firm, Convergence Catalyst. “It is natural not only for infrastructure partners to set shop in Vizag now—we’ll soon see more and more tech services firms having a presence in the region.”
“The actual big-margin business that all companies in cloud and data centre industries will chase are to integrate services for clients. Google, being present both as an infrastructure and services provider, can turn Vizag into India’s new Bengaluru,” Kolla added.
Smith, on this note, is one of the key leaders of the project, and is therefore no stranger to India—visiting the country “every six to seven weeks.”
“Quite a bit of India’s available supporting infrastructure has clearly been developed keeping new technologies and large-scale facilities in mind,” Smith said. “If this was not the case, it may have taken us considerably more time to build the project at a scale that we’re pursuing right now.”
Google’s data centre announcement marked a phase of consecutive big-ticket data centre bets in India since last year. Top projects announced include a $7 billion, 1GW data centre project by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Amazon’s $35-billion India investment including tech projects, Microsoft’s $17.5-billion AI and data centres commitment by chief Satya Nadella on 10 December, Reliance Industries’s $110 billion and Adani Enterprises’s $100 billion AI and data centre outlays, and Bharti Airtel’s private equity-backed 1GW, $1-billion fund-raise for Nxtra–its data centre subsidiary.
Even smaller, independent companies—such as Hyderabad’s CtrlS Datacenters with $425 million and Mumbai’s Yotta Data Services with $150 million in fund-raise rounds, have joined the fray.
The projects have justified Smith’s claim of Google establishing an “AI corridor” in India—since its announcement, multiple data centre projects, including Reliance Industries, TCS and renewable power firm Greenko Group-backed AM Intelligence have all announced facilities in and around the region.
“Beyond other facilities, what we’re seeing organically happen is that multiple independent small vendors and suppliers are increasingly setting up facilities in the region. In the long run, this will develop into a targeted AI corridor, and it should as well—we’re building Vizag as a strategically important location because it is geopolitically safe, and has all the right facilities as a third subsea cable landing site to boost networks and latencies.”
This, Smith said, will boost the region in the long run—for which Google is now beginning to ramp up investments in local communities.
“We’re investing in protecting the local aquifers and water table, and looking to spread clear awareness that our data centre will be entirely air-cooled—which means no periodic freshwater consumption. We are investing to build or increase power infrastructure in sub-stations, transformers and cables—even if we do not own the facility ourselves. We’re going to be a power-surplus facility, so we’ll be contributing back to the grid. Finally, we’re also investing to bring new technologies to local communities—such as explaining to local fishermen communities the benefits of using GPS for better returns,” he added.
All of this, though, is for the long run. At the moment, Google’s data centre construction remains in progress—Smith affirmed that the project is currently undertaking earthwork construction.
“We’re looking at mid-2028, or about two years, for the first phase of the data centre to come live. It will all happen in phases, and the full 1GW facility will likely come live in five to six years—perhaps by 2032,” he said.