Google Cloud to continue ramping up AI push in India
Google Cloud
will continue to increase its capacity in India, which it considers a critical market, as it expects to bring in all layers of its artificial intelligence (AI) stack - across models and hardware - within the country over time, a top executive said in New Delhi on Friday.
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When it comes to models, so far, only the
Gemini 1.5 Flash
model is hosted in India, but with 12-month refresh cycles, newer versions will also be made available locally, said
Bikram Singh Bedi
, vice president and country MD at Google Cloud India.
'India as a market, the growth that we are seeing is one of the fastest in the world and hence, we are moving very, very quickly to see how do we not just augment capacity but augment technology, to bring in the latest and the greatest so that the customers in India can then use the latest parts of our technology,' Bedi said.
Currently, Google Cloud has infrastructure capacity in two data centre zones in India - Mumbai and Delhi NCR.
In a significant move last October,
Gemini
1. 5 Flash became the first Google model enabled to run locally here to enable greater control and security for customers. Since then, however, more advanced versions such as Gemini 2.5 Flash - said to be more efficient as well - have been released.
On the Rs 10,000 crore
IndiaAI Mission
, under which the government is providing subsidised AI compute to startups and researchers, Bedi said that the company is working closely with the government on the opportunity and is keen to be a part of it.
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Google Cloud's Delhi region was set up with an eye on serving the public sector, he added.
The company has been deepening its engagements with government agencies.
For instance, it is partnering to host the civil servant capacity-building platform iGOT Karmayogi where it enables personalised recommendations, among other use cases.
Bedi said Google can optimise price performance of AI solutions better because all four layers of the stack are owned by it - the infrastructure, research and models, AI agents, and its AI training and deployment platform Vertex AI.
The company has released out-of-the-box AI customer agents, security agents, creative agents, and data agents, which can carry out tasks for these functions autonomously. It is also building AI agents that can interoperate with third-party AI agents.
The Google Cloud platform offers AI graphics processing units (GPU) and tensor processing unit (TPU) chips, and Google's Gemini, Imagen, Chirp, and Lyria multimodal models, among others.
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