Google on Wednesday announced a new undersea cable investment linking India to the US, Singapore, South Africa, and Australia as part of a package of infrastructure, skilling, and partnership initiatives unveiled by chief executive Sundar Pichai at a limited-access event in New Delhi.
The announcements position India as a central node in Google’s global AI infrastructure ambitions and come amid intensifying competition among American technology companies for influence in the country, especially as New Delhi hosts world leaders and tech leaders for the India AI Impact Summit.
The centrepiece of Wednesday’s announcements is the America-India Connect Initiative, which Google said will deliver new subsea cable routes linking the US and India to multiple locations across the southern hemisphere. In a statement, the company said the initiative is anchored by its existing five-year, $15 billion AI infrastructure investment in India.
The network will establish Visakhapatnam, on India’s east coast, as a major new international subsea gateway — the digital backbone has historically been concentrated in Mumbai and Chennai.
New fiber-optic paths will connect Vizag to South Africa and Singapore, creating redundant high-capacity routes to American east and west coasts respectively, the company said in a statement separately. Another path will connect Mumbai to Western Australia.
These routes do more than move bits and bytes — they honour a long history of global connection by turning maritime merchant shipping routes between the New World and India into digital trade routes between two countries,” the company said in its statement.
Pichai framed the infrastructure push in explicitly strategic terms. “AI is the biggest platform shift of our lifetime,” he said at the Delhi event. “For countries like India, AI presents a chance to leapfrog age-old gaps and create new opportunities.”
Beyond infrastructure, Google announced a new AI Professional Certificate programme to be rolled out in India in partnership with a government skilling initiative, available in English and Hindi with additional Indian languages to follow.
The company also announced a cloud partnership with Karmayogi Bharat, the Indian government’s civil service training mission, under which Google Cloud will serve as primary infrastructure provider for the iGOT platform, supporting over 20 million public servants across 800 districts in 18 Indian languages.
A new $30 million Google.org AI for Science Impact Challenge was also announced, aimed at supporting researchers globally using AI to drive scientific breakthroughs. The fund connects to DeepMind’s scientific tools, including AlphaFold, which Pichai noted is being used by more than 200,000 researchers in India.
Google additionally announced a partnership between Google DeepMind and the Indian government under what it described as a Global National Partnerships Programme, which Pichai said would broaden access to frontier AI capability for national partners. Details of the arrangement were limited.
The company also said it was partnering with Tata Tinkering Labs to bring generative AI tools to more than 10,000 Indian schools and 11 million students, with a focus on robotics and coding.
On the consumer product side, Pichai said Google would in the coming weeks launch Search Live, a real-time voice and camera search tool, noting that Indian users are already among the highest global adopters of voice and visual search.
Pichai was careful to frame the announcements as part of a longer-term partnership rather than a one-off investment push. “India is an architect of the AI future where adoption is responsible, rapid, and grounded in practical innovation,” he said. He described India as having the potential to be a “full-stack player” in AI — encompassing research, infrastructure, and mass adoption — and said the measure of success would be whether the technology reached the country’s most marginalised populations.
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