Google expands cloud services in India

New Delhi — Google is ramping up cloud infrastructure in India with a second cluster of data centres in and around New Delhi to meet increasing customer demands in a key growth market, senior company executives said.

The Google cloud region in the Indian capital and its outskirts is the US tech giant’s second such piece of infrastructure in the country and the 10th in 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.”

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

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

India’s fledgling start-up economy has also helped drive and accelerate the use of cloud services, said Bikram Singh Bedi, MD 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 $4.5bn in Jio Platforms, the digital unit of oil-to-telecoms conglomerate Reliance Industries, from a so-called $10bn digitisation 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 before the launch of 5G services. 

Reuters