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There is a city on India’s eastern coastline that is quietly becoming one of the most consequential pieces of global tech infrastructure you’ve never thought about. Visakhapatnam, known locally as Vizag, sits in the state of Andhra Pradesh and has historically been known for its port, its steel plants, and its naval base. It is now being redrawn as a gigawatt-scale AI compute hub, with investment commitments that rival anything happening in Singapore or the American Sun Belt.
The numbers are not modest. Google announced a $15 billion AI data center investment in October 2025, its first such project on Indian soil, with construction officially beginning on April 28, 2026. The facility is a 1 gigawatt campus developed in partnership with AdaniConneX and Airtel’s infrastructure arm Nxtra, and it will include subsea cable infrastructure designed to deepen Vizag’s role as a connectivity node across the Asia-Pacific region.
Who else is building, and how big
Google is not alone in making this bet. Meta has partnered with Sify Technologies on a 500 megawatt facility in Paradesipalem, backed by roughly $1.8 billion in capital. Then there is the consortium play. Reliance, Brookfield, and Digital Connexion are planning an $11 billion AI-native development targeting 1 gigawatt of capacity across 400 acres.
What ties all of this together is Andhra Pradesh’s policy framework, which allows large data centers to hold what the state calls a “deemed distribution licence.” In English: these operators can procure power directly from generators rather than routing everything through the state grid, which cuts operational costs and gives developers far more flexibility on sourcing renewable energy.
The city is also geographically well-positioned. Its eastern coastal location places it closer to Southeast Asian connectivity routes than Mumbai’s western-facing infrastructure, and the planned subsea cable upgrades attached to Google’s campus will amplify that advantage considerably.
What this means for decentralized compute and crypto-adjacent infrastructure
The energy dimension matters. Andhra Pradesh’s direct procurement policy creates real incentives for renewable sourcing at scale. As data center operators in Vizag seek to meet both carbon commitments and cost targets, renewable energy certificate markets and tokenized carbon credit infrastructure become more relevant.
There is also the local tension that tends to accompany this kind of rapid industrial scaling. Protests over water use and land acquisition have already surfaced in the region. These projects consume significant water for cooling and require large land parcels, and how Andhra Pradesh navigates those disputes will affect the pace of future commitments.
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