AI growth in India gets boost from Google Cloud

Google Cloud is accelerating its AI expansion in India with plans to bring its entire AI technology stack to this strategic growth market. The company is prioritizing local hosting of AI models to improve performance and data security while expanding data center infrastructure to better serve Indian enterprises and government agencies. This push comes as India emerges as one of Google Cloud’s fastest-growing global markets and aligns with the country’s own Rs 10,000 crore IndiaAI Mission initiative.

The big picture: Google Cloud is strategically positioning its complete AI stack in India, viewing the market as critical to its global growth ambitions.

• Vice President Bikram Singh Bedi confirmed plans to gradually introduce all layers of Google’s AI technology—including models, hardware, and platforms—into India.
• The company currently operates infrastructure in two data center zones (Mumbai and Delhi NCR), with the Delhi region specifically designed to serve government and regulated industries.

Current deployment status: Only the Gemini 1.5 Flash model is presently hosted locally in India, but more advanced models are on the horizon.

• With Google’s 12-month AI refresh cycles, newer versions like Gemini 2.5 Flash are expected to be deployed in India soon.
• Local hosting provides Indian customers with greater control, reduced latency, and enhanced data security.

Why this matters: India represents one of Google Cloud’s fastest-growing markets globally, driving the company’s rapid expansion of both capacity and cutting-edge technology offerings.

• The Delhi data center region was strategically established to serve public sector clients, including government agencies and highly regulated industries.
• Google Cloud is actively collaborating with the Indian government on the Rs 10,000 crore IndiaAI Mission, which aims to provide subsidized AI compute resources to startups and researchers.

Key partnerships: Google Cloud is working with the Indian government on several initiatives, including hosting the iGOT Karmayogi platform.

• The platform leverages AI to deliver personalized learning experiences and recommendations for civil servants.
• The company sees significant opportunity in providing AI infrastructure and services to the public sector.

Competitive advantage: Bedi highlighted Google’s end-to-end ownership of the AI technology stack as a distinctive strength.

• This vertical integration—spanning infrastructure, research, models, AI agents, and the Vertex AI platform—enables better price-performance for enterprise AI solutions.
• Google Cloud’s Indian platform includes a range of AI hardware options like GPUs and TPUs, supporting its suite of proprietary multimodal models including Gemini, Imagen, Chirp, and Lyria.

The road ahead: Google is developing out-of-the-box AI agents for specific business functions while enabling interoperability with third-party AI systems.

• The company has created purpose-built AI agents for customer service, security, creative tasks, and data analysis.
• These developments aim to make advanced AI capabilities more accessible and practical for Indian businesses and government agencies.