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Facility to be built in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh

state

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Google to invest $2 billion for renewable energy for

centre

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Andhra Pradesh targets 6 GW data centre capacity in five

years

By Sudarshan Varadhan

SINGAPORE, July 30 (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 ( SIFY ), which are

public," he said, referring to a 550-MW data centre Sify

Technologies ( SIFY ) 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.