Washington, October 14 (QNA) - Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., announced plans to invest $15 billion to build a major artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud data hub in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, marking the company's largest single investment outside the United States.
The new facility will be established in the port city of Visakhapatnam and will form part of Google's global network of AI data centers across 12 countries.
"It's the largest AI hub that we are going to be investing in anywhere in the world outside of the United States," said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, during an event in New Delhi on Tuesday, adding that the investment would be made over the next five years.
Andhra Pradesh's Minister of Information Technology, Nara Lokesh, described the project as "a massive leap for our state's digital future, innovation, and global standing."
According to the state government, the new hub will include a 1-gigawatt data center campus integrating advanced AI infrastructure, renewable energy systems, and an expanded fiber-optic network to support growing digital connectivity.
The project comes amid intensifying global competition among major technology firms to expand data center capacity to meet surging demand for AI-driven services. Google has pledged to spend approximately $85 billion this year on data infrastructure worldwide, while competitors such as Microsoft and Amazon have also invested billions of dollars in India -- a market with nearly one billion internet users. (QNA)