Google will invest $6 billion into a data centre in southern India, sources claim
Google, the Alphabet division of Alphabet, will invest $6 billion in developing a 1 gigawatt data center and its power infrastructure within the southern Indian state Andhra Pradesh. This is the first investment made by the Alphabet in India.
Two Andhra Pradesh sources who are directly involved in the matter said that the data centre will be built in Visakhapatnam and include $2 billion worth of renewable energy to power it.
The data centre of the search giant will be the biggest in terms of capacity and investment in Asia. It is part of a multibillion dollar expansion across the region, including Singapore Malaysia and Thailand. Alphabet announced in April that it would still spend $75 billion on data centres this year despite the uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump's tariff offensive.
Alphabet has not responded to the request for comment.
Nara Lokesh is Andhra Pradesh’s Minister of Information Technology. He is currently in Singapore, to discuss investment with government and business leaders.
He said: "We have made public certain announcements, like Sify Technologies' plans to build a 550 MW data centre in the state. There are some announcements that are not public yet. We will announce them in October.
STATE'S INVESTMENT DRIVER POST-SPLIT
Andhra Pradesh was divided in two by the Indian Prime Minister NarendraModi's ally, Telangana, which gained its former capital, Hyderabad, and major revenue sources.
Andhra Pradesh is now looking for investment to help ease the financial burden of its high debt and social expenditure.
Lokesh stated that Andhra Pradesh had already finalised investments in data centers with a total capacity of 1.6GW. He added that the state aims to construct 6GW of data centre over the next 5 years, from a near zero level currently.
He anticipates that the first 1.6 GW data centres, which have been agreed upon, will be operational within the next 24 months. According to Anarock, this would be more data centres than the 1.4 GW that are currently operating in the country.
We're also working to get three cable landing stations at Visakhapatnam. "We want to build a cable network that is two times as large as Mumbai's today," Lokesh stated.
Cable landing stations are typically located near data centres that require fast and reliable connections with global networks. They store equipment to receive and relay data from undersea cable.
Lokesh said that the state is also looking at building up energy infrastructure in order to meet the sustainability requirements for data centres. He said he anticipated power generation capacity requirements of as much as 10 GW from the electricity-intensive industry over the next five years.
He said that the majority of the energy will be green. This is the unique value proposition we can bring to the table.
He added that some of the new capacity would be coal-fired as data centres need reliable power at high volumes throughout the day. (Reporting and editing by Joe Bavier; Sudarshan Varadahan)
(source: Reuters)
