Google is building a $15 billion AI data centre in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. The “gigawatt-scale” facility — Google’s biggest AI hub outside the United States — is set to start operating in 2028. But many people living near the site are pushing back. They fear the project will drain local water and power, damage the environment, and bring too few jobs in return. Google says it takes the concerns seriously and will use air cooling instead of water.
The project, in brief
The site is at Tarluvada village near Visakhapatnam, a port city most Indians know as Vizag. It covers 600 acres — more than 340 football fields, according to TechXplore. Excavators have already started clearing farmland and forest on the coast.
Why Vizag? The city is a landing point for undersea internet cables linking India to Singapore. Google’s Alexander Smith, its head of infrastructure and energy for Asia-Pacific, told AFP the coastline also lets undersea cables link Visakhapatnam to South Africa and Australia, positioning Andhra Pradesh as “India’s third major subsea hub.”
Google picked the spot for “proximity to customers and users, access to talent, potential for new clean energy and opportunities to establish mutually beneficial partnerships with local communities,” Smith said. “Visakhapatnam is one of the few places where all of these come together.”
Why locals are angry
The anger is visible. At a meeting of around 150 people in Visakhapatnam, campaign posters showed handcuffs around Google’s logo. Another poster warned that people “cannot drink data,” AFP reported.
Farmer Chandala Sadamma said that when she sees the red-earth scars where her plot of mango and cashew trees once stood, “I feel like crying.” She was paid more than $82,000 for the two-acre stretch, but said the company took the land “without showing any respect.”
Shopkeeper Gubbala Ramanamma, 57, stood beside a dry well and told AFP: “we are already struggling with water scarcity.” The Andhra Pradesh government says people who lived on the site got financial compensation and new housing is being built for them. For many, that isn’t the point.
“Why are they coming here?” asked Gutta Rohith of the local campaign group Human Rights Forum. “The United States has a huge coast… They can simply set it up there.” Activists want a freeze on new data centres across Andhra Pradesh until independent studies on their environmental and social impact are made public. Something similar just happened in Finland, where an authority ordered work halted at two Google data centre sites pending environmental assessments.
Why do data centres need so much power and water?
A data centre is a giant building full of computer servers. They run day and night. Servers get hot — especially the powerful chips used for AI, which do billions of calculations every second.
Two things follow. First, power: the servers themselves need electricity, and so do the cooling systems that stop them from overheating. A “gigawatt-scale” facility means it runs at the gigawatt level — a gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts, the kind of load more usually talked about for whole cities. Google does not disclose the exact capacity of the Vizag site.
Second, water: the cheapest way to cool servers is with water, and many data centres worldwide use large amounts of it. That is why residents near Vizag are worried — the area already faces water shortages. Google’s answer is to use “advanced” air cooling instead of water cooling at Vizag, after its own water assessment “pointed to pressure on the local watershed,” Smith told AFP.
The jobs question
This is where the two sides talk past each other. Google says the hub will generate about $688 million in local economic activity each year, support roughly 4,200 jobs during construction, and create “hundreds of specialist jobs” once it starts operating in 2028. “For every job inside a Google data center we support nine additional jobs in the surrounding community,” Smith said.
The Andhra Pradesh government goes further: it expects “188,000 direct and indirect jobs.” But it didn’t say what that estimate covers — construction workers, suppliers, induced jobs, or something else entirely.
Rohith’s reply: “We need mass employment and labour-intensive industries, not high-capital industries.” A data centre, once built, runs with a small skilled crew. It is not a factory floor. That mismatch — a $15 billion project with a few hundred permanent jobs — is at the heart of the protest.
What’s confirmed, and what’s still unclear
Confirmed: the $15 billion investment, the Tarluvada site under construction, the 2028 target, and Google’s commitment to air cooling. Smith also said independent environmental assessments — covering grid stability, power supply, water risk, and ecology — are done 12 to 24 months before a project begins, and promised: “If there is insufficient power in a location, or if operating a data centre would mean taking power away from a community, Google will either find ways to develop more power, or it will not build there.” The state, for its part, plans six 1.2-gigawatt nuclear power plants as energy demand rises.
Unclear: the facility’s actual power draw (Google won’t say), what the government’s 188,000-jobs figure is based on, and what the environmental assessments actually found — activists want those published before more projects get approved.
What happens next
Construction continues. The moratorium demand is still just a demand — the state hasn’t agreed to it. And Google isn’t the only giant coming: a joint venture of Reliance Industries, Brookfield, and Digital Realty is putting $11 billion into another AI data centre in Vizag, AFP reported.
So Vizag is about to find out what it means to be India’s AI coast. Whether the locals’ water and power fears prove right will depend on something boring but crucial: whether the environmental assessments Google talks about are real, independent, and public.
Google’s hub is the latest chapter in big tech’s rush into India — the same rush behind the Musk vs Ambani fight over satellite internet. And Vizag’s new undersea cables are part of the same story as satellite internet coming to India’s villages: the race to build the country’s digital backbone.
