When Google announced its first AI hub in India last October, the headline was the money: about $15 billion over five years from 2026 to 2030, the company's largest investment in the country. Ten months later, the harder part is coming into view. Building a gigawatt of computing in Visakhapatnam also means building the power plants, transmission lines and storage to run it, on the same timetable.
"We are solving a multi-variable equation in parallel, so that all of it can show up together at the right time," Alexander Smith, Google's principal of global infrastructure and energy for Asia Pacific, told Business Standard on 27 August. "When we talk about having a full AI infrastructure stack, you need the cable components, the renewable energy generation, and energy transmission infrastructure to come together. And then the core data centre facilities also themselves need to come in."
The timeline
Google broke ground on the 1 GW campus in April 2026. Smith said the company hopes to finish construction of the first phase within 24 to 30 months and begin initial operations soon after, putting first operations around late 2028. It aims to complete all phases over the next five years.
He was candid about the pace. "Often the first building that is built is the most expensive and slowest," he said, adding that overall completion will depend on how quickly lessons from the first phase are applied. The five-year timeline assumes no further expansion beyond the current project.
Power built with the campus
From the outset Google said the hub would include more than data halls. Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud, wrote in October 2025 that the company would work with partners "to deliver new transmission lines, clean energy generation, and energy storage systems in Andhra Pradesh, expanding the diverse portfolio of clean energy that contributes to India's electricity grid."
AdaniConneX, the data centre joint venture of Adani Enterprises, is building the campus with Google, and Airtel is a connectivity partner. Adani said on 14 October 2025 that the partnership includes new transmission lines, clean energy generation and energy storage systems in Andhra Pradesh, which it said would support the data centre's operations and also improve the resilience and capacity of India's electricity grid. Gautam Adani, the group's chairman, said the project would create tens of thousands of jobs in technology, construction and clean energy.
The approach reflects a reality of large data centres in India. A single 1 GW site needs a supply chain of generation and wires that does not exist yet, and building it on a data centre's schedule is a challenge for state utilities and transmission companies working alone. Bundling energy infrastructure into the project shifts part of that burden onto the developer and its partners.
Scale in context
The size of the project is clearest against India's existing fleet. The country had about 1.5 GW of data centre capacity in 2025, up from 375 MW in 2020, The Indian Express reported in July. Google's campus alone, at 1 GW, would equal about two thirds of that base.
The national outlook is growing just as fast. India's Ministry of Power told Parliament on 27 July that AI data centres will add 26.3 GW of electricity load by 2031-32, almost double the 13.56 GW it projected in March, and that the additional load will be served mainly by renewable capacity. Samir Chandra Saxena, chairman and managing director of Grid Controller of India, warned at the India AI Impact Summit in February that data centre load "is variable, it is spiky, it has sharp ramps". The newspaper also reported that discussions were under way about locating data centres away from urban centres to avoid transmission congestion.
Visakhapatnam fits that thinking. It sits on the east coast, away from the established cable landing hubs of Mumbai and Chennai.
Private forecasts point the same way. Wood Mackenzie expects India's operational data centre capacity to reach 12 GW by 2030, growing about 40 per cent a year, with AI-dedicated capacity rising nearly 24-fold from 275 MW to 6,546 MW over the same period, The Indian Express reported. The consultancy forecast that data centre electricity demand will grow 20-fold by 2040 from 10 TWh in 2025, reaching 7 per cent of national demand. On those numbers, a single 1 GW Google campus is a large share of the AI capacity India is expected to add this decade.
Google has framed the project in national terms as well. Kurian said it aligns with the government's Viksit Bharat 2047 vision and could help anchor the next phase of U.S.-India technology cooperation. The campus will be built to the same standards as the facilities that run Search, YouTube and Workspace, he said.
Cables and connectivity
The hub is also a network project. Google is laying new subsea cables to give the Vizag site direct connectivity to Singapore, Australia, West Asia and Europe, with links onward to the United States, Smith said. Kurian said the new subsea gateway would complement existing cable landings in Mumbai and Chennai, providing route diversity for India's digital backbone. Google will also build inter-city high-capacity fibre to connect Vizag to major metros in a hub-and-spoke design. "We will be building that really dense high-capacity fibre network," Smith said. He added that Google hopes the hub will cut latency for AI applications in India, where it has seen the fastest scaling of most of its tools and services.
That matters for power as well as latency. A site with strong connectivity can serve users across India and abroad, which justifies placing a gigawatt of demand where land and new generation can be developed, rather than in congested metro grids.
What to watch
The first test is whether the energy infrastructure keeps pace with the buildings. If renewable generation, storage and transmission in Andhra Pradesh are delayed, the first phase could be ready before its power supply. The second is how the state grid absorbs a load of this size alongside other projects, given the ministry's concern about sharp ramps. The third is cost. Google has not disclosed how the energy assets will be contracted, and the terms will show whether India's largest data centre project pays fully for the grid investment it requires or relies partly on public utilities.