Gautam Adani is putting down $5 billion to back Google’s new AI hub in southern India, according to a report by Bloomberg. The money is going into a data center complex being built in Visakhapatnam, a port city in Andhra Pradesh, through Adani’s infrastructure arm AdaniConneX Pvt., which is a joint venture between Adani Enterprises and EdgeConneX. The investment figure was confirmed by Jugeshinder Singh, Adani’s chief financial officer, during a press event held this week in Mumbai. He said the final details are still being sorted, but the commitment is solid. The project is being built in partnership with Alphabet Inc. Singh didn’t give a breakdown of how the capital will be deployed, but the hub is expected to anchor India’s largest AI data campus so far. Singh made it clear that this is part of a wider plan to expand digital infrastructure to meet rising demand across sectors using artificial intelligence. The announcement follows similar mega-deals pouring into India’s data center space, all racing to build the back-end for global AI services. Reliance, Tata, and OpenAI target Andhra Pradesh Just days before Singh’s statement, Reliance Industries confirmed it had signed an $11 billion agreement through its unit Digital Connexion to develop its own data center projects in Visakhapatnam. That deal came right after Tata Consultancy Services secured $1 billion in backing from TPG Inc. to fast-track its data infrastructure goals. All of them are headed to Andhra Pradesh. CBRE Group estimates that India’s total data center market could top $100 billion by 2027, and this city on the southeastern coast has suddenly become a magnet for new development.Google, Amazon, and OpenAI are all part of that wave. Amazon plans to spend $12.7 billion on building cloud infrastructure in India by 2030. OpenAI, meanwhile, is hunting for space to install a 1-gigawatt data center somewhere in the region. That’s the scale of what’s happening now. Nara Lokesh, technology minister for Andhra Pradesh, said the Visakhapatnam site alone accounts for over $10 billion in total investment from Google, and added that it’s not just about tech jobs. “It’s about the larger ripple effect that it creates, the economic activity it creates,” Lokesh said in an interview. He’s part of the Telugu Desam Party, the group led by his father, Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu, and they’ve both been pushing hard to make Andhra Pradesh the new destination for hyperscale tech deals. Modi allies back AI buildout with subsidies and land The state government is already offering subsidized land and power to lure more private players into the region. That support ties into the larger national strategy pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has made tech investment a major part of his second-term economic plan. But the road isn’t smooth. Power supply in India remains unstable, and water access is becoming a concern as AI data farms suck up huge amounts of both. Lokesh said they’re working on long-term solutions and are in talks about creating new national-level policies to help companies settle in the region. “We are willing to have conversations which might even require policy intervention at the federal level,” he said. He described their plan as a “double engine, a bullet train” approach to get everything moving faster. Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, said the Visakhapatnam campus is being built “to provide a full AI infrastructure” not just for Google’s use, but also for entrepreneurs, enterprises, and commercial users across India. Kurian spoke to reporters in New Delhi about how the facility will support AI applications across industries. Andhra Pradesh has a goal of hitting 6 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2029, with Visakhapatnam leading the charge. The state previously helped turn Hyderabad into a global tech city in the 1990s under Naidu’s leadership, landing major campuses for companies like Microsoft and Oracle. Join a premium crypto trading community free for 30 days - normally $100/mo.
