Google is pushing forward with a US$15 billion artificial intelligence data centre hub in Visakhapatnam despite community protests over power grids and water supplies in southern India.

The gigawatt-scale development represents the search giant’s largest AI infrastructure project outside the United States and is scheduled to enter service in 2028.

Local groups and environmental activists in Andhra Pradesh have called for a blanket moratorium on data centre construction across the state until authorities assess collective ecological impacts. The development footprint spans construction sites at Tarluvada village and Rambilli in the Anakapalli district, placing heavy computing loads in an area already experiencing water stress.

Google altered its baseline engineering for the campus after pre-development studies identified acute pressure on the surrounding watershed. The facility will rely on advanced air cooling instead of evaporative water cooling towers to chill server racks, avoiding the millions of litres of daily freshwater extraction typical of large-scale server farms.

Facility maintenance and non-cooling operations will still draw municipal water. The company has pledged to replenish 120 per cent of the volume consumed by non-cooling facility needs across its operational footprint by 2030.

Grid capacity presents a parallel bottleneck. While Google declines to publish site-level electricity numbers, company executives state that the group pays for all necessary grid substation and transmission upgrades upfront while funding local renewable energy projects above statutory quotas.

Visakhapatnam offers direct coastal access for international subsea fibre connections linking India to landing stations in Australia and South Africa. That routing establishes Andhra Pradesh as India’s third core subsea landing hub alongside Mumbai and Chennai, giving enterprise networks faster bandwidth to Southeast Asia and Indian Ocean routes.

Source link