Google Cloud: Google to continue expanding capacity of India data centre zones

Google, which on Thursday announced a step that would enable businesses to run its Gemini 1.5 Flash artificial intelligence model locally in India, will continue to invest in building the capacity of its two existing data centre zones in Mumbai and Delhi, a top executive said.

“Google Cloud India is one of the fastest growing regions of Google Cloud across the world,” Bikram Singh Bedi, vice-president and country managing director of Google Cloud, told ET in a virtual interview. “Adoption there is significantly accelerated. So capacity is continuing to grow for us and we’re going to continue to invest in growing our capacity.”

At its flagship Google for India event, the company said Indian organisations across all sectors, including public sector enterprises, will have the option to both store their data at rest and conduct machine-learning processing for the Gemini 1.5 Flash large language model entirely within India. “This provides even greater control and security for organisations using our most-advanced AI models,” Google said.

To help export the unique architecture of India’s DPI (digital public infrastructure) stack to enable other nations to build their digital infrastructure, Google Cloud is collaborating with the Nandan Nilekani-led EkStep Foundation to create a plug-and-play model, ‘DPI in a box’, the tech giant said.

On Google’s deployment of the “DPI-in-a-box” solution, Bedi said: “As far as areas of deployment, of course, the global South is a big area for us.”

India is taking great leadership around the DPI space and there is a lot of demand for adopting the DPI model across the Caribbean, African and Southeast Asian countries, he said.

Decisions to expand its technology and infrastructure footprint are based on customer demand and needs, Bedi said, adding that Google is the only cloud provider that offers variants across public cloud, edge and the air-gap model.“When you look at generative AI and the fact that we’re bringing the technology to India and we are setting it up here as a part of our global expansion, we will keep bringing these technologies closer to our customers,” he said.

There is significant adoption of the technology across sectors in India, Bedi said, pointing to partner companies like HDFC Ergo, Federal Bank, the Mahindra Group, Apollo Hospitals, Aditya Birla Venture’s fashion brand TMRW and IndiGo.

Whether it is AI hardware or models, customers need a diversity of options, Bedi said. Google’s approach is to enable that with an open and integrated stack.