GCP – Supporting Viksit Bharat: Announcing our newest AI investments in India

India’s developer community, vibrant startup ecosystem, and leading enterprises are embracing AI with incredible speed. To meet this moment for India, we are investing in powerful, locally-available tools in India that can help foster a diverse ecosystem, and ensure our platform delivers the controls you need for compliance and AI sovereignty.

Today, we’re announcing a significant expansion of our local AI hardware capacity for customers in India. This increase in local compute, powered by Google’s AI Hypercomputer architecture with the latest Trillium TPUs, will help more businesses and public sector organizations train and serve their most advanced Gemini models in India. 

By unblocking new opportunities for high-performance, low-latency AI applications we can help customers meet India’s data residency and sovereignty requirements.

Enabling models and control: AI tools built for India’s context

While infrastructure is the foundation for digital sovereignty, it also requires control over the data and the models built on it. We’re committed to bringing our latest AI advancements to India faster than ever, with the controls you need.

Our new services would enable you to build, tune, and deploy models that understand India’s unique business logic and rich cultural context.

• Next-generation models, here in India: Earlier this year, Google Cloud made Gemini available to regulated Indian customers by deploying Gemini 2.5 Flash with local machine-learning processing support. Now, we’re opening early testing for our latest and most advanced Gemini models to Indian customers. We’re also committing to launching the most powerful Gemini models in India with full data residency support. This is a first for Google Cloud, and a direct response to help meet the needs of our Indian customers.

• More AI capabilities, available locally: We’re providing additional consumption models and pre-built AI-powered applications tailored for local context by launching a suite of new capabilities with data residency support in India:

• Batch support for Gemini 2.5 Flash: Now generally available, this allows organizations to run high-volume, non-real-time AI tasks at a lower cost, all in India.

• Document AI: Now in preview, we’re providing local support to help Indian businesses automate document processing.

A sovereign AI ecosystem: Building for India, with India

The most durable and decisive factor for long-term digital sovereignty lies in cultivating the “human element” — the skilled talent and innovation ecosystem. A sovereign AI future depends on building a strong local ecosystem.

Our strategy is to support India’s ecosystem-led approach by investing in the researchers, developers, and startups who are building for India’s specific needs.

Collaboration with IIT Madras: Google Cloud and Google DeepMind are thrilled to collaborate with IIT Madras to support the launch of Indic Arena. Run independently by the renowned AI4Bharat center at IIT Madras, this platform will allow users from all over India to anonymously evaluate and rank AI models on tasks unique to India’s rich multilingual landscape. To support this initiative, we are providing cloud credits to power this critical, community-driven resource.

“At AI4Bharat, our mission is to build AI for India’s specific needs. A critical part of this is having a neutral, standardized benchmark to understand how models are performing across our many languages,” said Mitesh Khapra, associate professor, IIT Madras. “Indic Arena will be that platform. We are delighted to have Google Cloud’s support to provide the initial compute power to bring this independent, public-facing project to life for the entire Indian AI community.”

We encourage all developers, researchers, and organizations in India to explore the Indic Arena platform and contribute to building a more inclusive AI future.

We invite the entire Indian ecosystem, from startups and universities to government bodies and enterprises, to take advantage of this new, dedicated capacity for Gemini in Vertex AI and our sovereign-ready infrastructure to build the next generation of AI that is built by Indians, for Indians.