New infrastructure push helps Google expand India cloud services

WITH THE aim of meeting increasing customer demands in a key growth market, Alphabet Inc.’s Google is ramping up cloud infrastructure in India with a second cluster of data centers in and around capital New Delhi, senior company executives said yesterday.

The Google cloud region in Delhi and its outskirts is the U.S. tech giant’s second such piece of infrastructure in the country and the tenth in the Asia Pacific.

“We have seen enormous growth in demand for Google cloud services in India so expanding our footprint in a new cloud region gives us the ability to offer more capacity for growth over many years,” Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud, told a news conference this week ahead of a formal announcement on Thursday. “It’s a large commitment from us in capital and infrastructure investment and it’s designed to allow us to capture the opportunity that we see around growth.”

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The new infrastructure will help provide solutions for problems such as disaster recovery within India and ensure low latency for many state-run enterprises in and around Delhi, Kurian added.

Google did not say how much it had invested to set up the new cloud facilities.

India’s fledgling startup economy has also helped drive and accelerate the use of cloud services, said Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director at Google Cloud’s India unit.

Google Cloud counts home-grown social network ShareChat, online travel firm Cleartrip and private sector lender HDFC Bank among its India customers.

Google has bet big on India. Last year, it invested $4.5 billion in Jio Platforms, the digital unit of oil-totelecoms conglomerate Reliance Industries, from a so-called $10 billion digitization fund targeted for the country.

In June, Google said it was forging a partnership with Jio to help India’s biggest wireless carrier with tech solutions for enterprise and consumer offerings ahead of the launch of 5G services.