By CIO Insider Team
 

Google Cloud's planned $15 billion AI-ready data center in Vishakhapatnam will have a capacity reaching 5 gigawatts (GW), CEO Thomas Kurian stated.

Though the company has so far only indicated that the future AI hub will be 'gigawatt scale', a 5 GW capacity significantly exceeds India's total data center capacity of 1.5 GW at the end of 2025, as per reports.

During a media roundtable at the ongoing Google Cloud Next 2026 annual summit, Kurian stated that the future campus will feature several data centres. "And subsequently, that increases to 5 GW." "That campus is extremely, extremely vast," he mentioned.

Scheduled to occur over five years (2026-2030), this investment represents Google's biggest investment in India thus far, and the largest single investment by the tech giant outside the United States.

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Once operational, the new data center campus will become part of Google’s network of current AI data centers located in 12 countries. Google Cloud is capable of moving workflows between the centers during crises, most recently following the outbreak of conflict in the Middle East.

In response to a question about how India's push for data localization affects the free transfer of data among Google Cloud data centres, Kurian noted that during crises, governments have lifted data localization requirements.

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"According to Kurian, during crises in the Middle East, the government allowed companies, especially those in critical infrastructure such as banks or utilities that might face external threats, to move their data and store it in various locations."

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He indicated that data can be effortlessly duplicated and saved across the company's various cloud regions in Mumbai (asia-south1) and Delhi (asia-south2) in a potential crisis, given their uniformity. "In a crisis, you can duplicate from any of these to any of the others within India," Kurian stated.