India plans AI Data City on Staggering Scale in AP: Lokesh

“The AI revolution is here, no second thoughts about it,” said Nara Lokesh, information technology minister for Andhra Pradesh, which is positioning Visakhapatnam as a cornerstone of India's AI push.

“As a nation... we have taken a stand that we've got to embrace it,” he said, ahead of the India AI Impact Summit beginning in New Delhi in Monday.

Lokesh said the state had secured investment agreements of $175 billion involving 760 projects, including a $15 billion investment by Google for its largest AI infrastructure hub outside the United States. Besides, a joint venture between Reliance Industries, Canada's Brookfield, and the US firm Digital Realty is investing $11 billion to develop an AI data centre in the same city.

Visakhapatnam is now being pitched as a landing point for submarine internet cables linking India to Singapore. “The data city is going to come in one ecosystem... with a 100 kilometre (60 mile) radius,” Lokesh said. For comparison, Taiwan is roughly 100 kilometres wide.

Lokesh said the plan went far beyond data connectivity, and added that Andhra Pradesh had “received close to 25 per cent of all foreign direct investments” to India in 2025.

“It's not just about the data centres,” he explained while outlining a sweeping vision of change, with Andhra Pradesh offering land at one US cent (about 91 paise) per acre (three per hectare) for major investors.

“I'm chasing the companies that make those servers that go sit in those data centres, the companies that make the entire air conditioning, the water-cooling system — the whole nine yards,” the 43-year-old, Stanford-educated minister said.

Some question whether data centres will create meaningful employment when up and running, but Lokesh rejected that.

“Every industrial revolution has always created more jobs than it has displaced,” he said. “But it has created those jobs in countries that have embraced the industrial revolution.”

Lokesh argued that the jobs and economic benefits would more than compensate for the giveaway cost of land.

He said the Andhra Pradesh government had accounted for the vast electricity and water demands for the energy-hungry industry, and would tap “surplus water” that drains into the Bay of Bengal to cool the massive data centres.

“It's a crime that so much water during monsoons goes into our oceans,” he said.

He cited China as an inspiration, admiring how India's rival had “been able to systematically bring people out of poverty” at speed. Andhra Pradesh's plan to create industrial clusters was something he had “learned from China”.

With a target of six gigawatts of data centre capacity — three already signed and another three in the pipeline — Andhra Pradesh is betting that speed and scale will give it an edge.

New Delhi last year agreed to “in-principle approval” for six 1.2 GW nuclear power plants at Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh.

“We are on a journey,” Lokesh said. “We will execute these projects at a pace that the country has never seen”.