In a landmark announcement that could redefine India's digital future, Google CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled plans for the company's first ever artificial intelligence hub in Vishakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. This $15 billion project marks Google's largest investment in India and one of the biggest foreign tech commitments in recent years. In this video, we break down what this means for India's AI ambitions, the global tech landscape, and how it fits into the government's Viksit Bharat 2047 vision. Speaking on X, Sundar Pichai said he had a great conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, briefing him about Google's plans to set up its first AI hub in Vishakhapatnam, a project he called a landmark development. Pichai said the hub will combine gigawatt-scale compute capacity, a new international subsea cable gateway, and large-scale energy infrastructure, bringing Google's industry-leading AI capabilities to India. He added that the initiative will accelerate AI innovation and drive growth across the country. Google's upcoming AI hub in Vishakhapatnam will serve as a massive data and compute powerhouse, the largest of its kind outside the US. The hub will not only host next-generation AI research and deployment but will also strengthen India's digital backbone with a high-speed international subsea gateway that connects India to global data networks. Partnering with the Adani Group, the hub will support vast energy infrastructure and create a foundation for AI-driven services across industries, from healthcare and education to finance and manufacturing.
At the signing ceremony in New Delhi, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian described the project as a landmark investment in India's digital future. He said by delivering industry-leading AI infrastructure at scale, Google is enabling Indian businesses to innovate faster and unlock inclusive growth opportunities. Kurian highlighted that this collaboration reflects a shared commitment between the Indian and US governments to harness AI responsibly and ensure it drives transformative societal impact.
You know, it's a really important day for us because Google started working on AI back in 2006, 2007. At that time, AI was not seen as a mainstream technology, and we had this vision that if you can have computational intelligence, it can really assist people in every sector and in every part of the economy. We've had a teacher in Hyderabad send us a note about one of our products and how she used it to build an academic curriculum for her class. And she said, 'I had access to this tool. I just went on the internet and was able to build a class for my students which would have been very difficult for me to do before.' We're seeing AI being used to answer questions when people are diagnosed with a disease. For example, they go to see a doctor, they're anxious about the diagnosis, and they may have follow-on questions. Many of them who live in rural areas may not have access to expert doctors, but now using these AI tools, they are able to get answers to questions. We've seen people using digital agricultural platforms, farmers for example asking very basic questions like what kind of fertilizer do they use, how much do they use, what kind of weather conditions are likely to affect crops. The knowledge that these tools have can assist them in planning, planting, and harvesting a lot better. We're also working with our teams here in India, our engineering teams, to put together digital infrastructure for commerce, to bring merchants online. So it's much easier to offer your products and services to people. And we see AI being used, for example, to build a commerce agent that can help people find products and services they need, transact using newer payment protocols that have no friction and are very easy to use. And so we see all of these as advances in technology that we're bringing through the AI hub.
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Pichai, S. (2025, October 14). Google’s $15 Billion Bet On India: Sundar Pichai, Modi Announce Nation’s 1st AI Hub In Visakhapatnam [Interview transcript]. The Indian Express. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/368525/
MLA
Sundar Pichai. "Google’s $15 Billion Bet On India: Sundar Pichai, Modi Announce Nation’s 1st AI Hub In Visakhapatnam." The Indian Express, 14 Oct. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/368525/.
BibTeX
@misc{pichai2025_368525,
author = {Sundar Pichai},
title = {Google’s $15 Billion Bet On India: Sundar Pichai, Modi Announce Nation’s 1st AI Hub In Visakhapatnam},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Indian Express. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/368525/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
