The hills outside Visakhapatnam don’t look like much. Dry forests, a few fences, wired-off empty plots. Except that 10 trucks and four levellers are tearing into them right now, pulling up chunks of hillside with mechanical claws. 

Workmen are everywhere—surveying, levelling, and driving the machines. “My cousins used to graze goats here up until a few months ago,” said Mahesh, who was part of the surveying team. “In three years, this will all be Google.”

The hills will be alive (and flattened) with the hum of servers.

A few yards away, a hastily built office has men with papers milling about. A storage container nearby bears the cream-and-yellow banner of Cemindia Projects, an Adani Group company and Google’s newest data-centre partner in India.

This is Tarluvada, one of three sites across Visakhapatnam where Google is building a 1 GW data-centre campus, its largest AI hub outside the US. It is also one small piece of something much larger. 

Andhra Pradesh has promised Google, Meta, Reliance, Tata Consultancy Services, and half a dozen others a combined 5 GW of data-centre capacity in Vizag alone. That is more than three times everything India has built in 30 years, in a city that had near-zero data-centre infrastructure six months ago. 

India’s total existing capacity of 1.3 GW is spread across Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bengaluru, cities with decades of industrial and power infrastructure behind them. Vizag has none of that. What it has is a willing state government, a coastline, and a land bank. 

The ambitions of the state’s Deputy Chief Minister Nara Lokesh go further still. He has committed to 6 GW across Andhra Pradesh in five years, a cable network twice the size of Mumbai’s, and three undersea cable-landing stations—essentially building a digital future on the eastern coast.

To understand how this pans out, all one has to do is look at the rest of the world.  In the US, data-centre project cancellations quadrupled in 2025: 25 projects killedtechradar proIf one piece of your supply chain is delayed, then your whole project can't deliver': Nearly half of US data centers planned for 2026 canceled or delayed — and things could soon get much worse, up from six the year before.

© The Ken