By Sudarshan Varadhan
SINGAPORE (Reuters) -Google will invest $6 billion to develop a 1-gigawatt data centre and its power infrastructure in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in the Alphabet unit’s first such investment in India, government sources said on Wednesday.
Due to be built in the port city of Visakhapatnam, the data centre investment includes $2 billion in renewable energy capacity that will be used to power the facility, two Andhra Pradesh government sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
The search giant’s data centre will be the largest in capacity and investment size in Asia and is part a multi-billion-dollar expansion of its data centre portfolio across the region in countries including Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.
In April, Alphabet said it was still committed to spending some $75 billion this year to build data centre capacity despite the economic uncertainty resulting from U.S. President Donald Trump’s global tariff offensive.
Alphabet did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Andhra Pradesh’s information technology minister Nara Lokesh, who is in Singapore to discuss investments with thegovernment and business leaders there, did not comment on the Google investment.
“We’ve made certain announcements like Sify, which are public,” he said, referring to a 550-MW data centre Sify Technologies plans to build in the state. “There are certain announcements which are not yet public. In October, we will make those announcements.”
STATE’S POST-SPLIT INVESTMENT DRIVE
Andhra Pradesh, a state run by a leading ally of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was split into two in 2014, losing its former capital Hyderabad and a major revenue source to the newly created Telangana state.
Andhra Pradesh has since been looking to attract investments to ease the financial strains of high debt and social spending.
Lokesh said Andhra Pradesh has already been able to finalise investments in data centres with total capacity of 1.6 GW, adding that it aims to build 6 GW of data centres over the next five years from nearly zero currently.
He expects the initial 1.6 GW of already agreed data centres to be operational in the next 24 months. That would be more than the 1.4 GW currently in operation in the entire country, according to real estate consultancy Anarock.
“We’re also working on getting three cable landing stations in Visakhapatnam. We want to create enough of cable network, which will be two times what Mumbai has today,” Lokesh said.
Cable landing stations – typically located close to data centres requiring fast and reliable connections to global networks – are used to store equipment which receives and relays data from undersea cables.
Lokesh also said the state was looking to build up energy infrastructure to meet sustainability requirements of 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.
“Majority will end up being actually green energy, and that’s the unique value proposition that we bring to the table,” he said.
Some of the additional capacity will be coal-fired, however, as data centres require reliable, high volume power throughout the day, he added.
(Reporting by Sudarshan Varadhan; Editing by Joe Bavier)
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