🇮🇳BREAKING: A once-quiet Indian port city just became the frontline of the country's AI buildout, and not everyone there is celebrating.

Visakhapatnam, on India's southern coast, is getting two massive data centers at once. Google is building a $15 billion, one-gigawatt facility there in partnership with Gautam Adani, a billionaire widely seen as one of the closest business allies to Prime Minister Modi. Separately, Brookfield and Reliance are building another data center in the same city just as large. Together, the two projects will more than double India's entire data center capacity from where it stood at the end of last year.
Here's why India is moving this fast. The country produces roughly 20% of the world's data but holds only a small fraction of global data center capacity, and Morgan Stanley has already called India a "laggard" in AI infrastructure. Billions in capital have already left for Taiwan and South Korea, countries that actually make the chips this technology runs on. India isn't trying to lead AI innovation anymore. It's trying to become the place that deploys it.
The state government sweetened the deal hard to win it: a 25% discount on land, along with steep subsidies on water and electricity. Modi's government went further, changing tax rules specifically so foreign companies like Google wouldn't have to pay Indian taxes on data stored in Indian facilities, something the state's own IT minister openly credits himself for pushing through.
The tension is real on the ground. Officials are promising 120,000 construction jobs and 60,000 permanent ones. But the same environmental filings used to get this project approved, the ones detailing things down to how many parking spaces are needed, imply a workforce far smaller than that. Activists have submitted satellite images to India's National Green Tribunal showing construction started before environmental clearance was even granted, on land near a wildlife sanctuary and a drinking water reservoir catchment in a region that already runs water-stressed most summers.
Google says its cooling systems won't touch the local potable water supply and that it's investing in its own clean energy so no costs land on residents. A former Indian energy planning official put the counterargument simply: every subsidy is still a cost, it just gets paid by someone else later, usually through higher electricity bills once new transmission lines get built to feed the site.
This is the actual trade India is making in real time. Chase the AI buildout hard enough to catch up, or protect water and land in the exact places being asked to absorb the cost of that ambition. Right now it's choosing both, and hoping the tension doesn't come due before the ribbon cutting.