New Delhi, Aug. 27 -- In late 2024, a team of engineers from Google travelled to Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh-a place once known for its clean beaches, fishing villages and shipyards-to explore the viability of setting up a large data centre facility in India.

Less than 12 months later, on 14 October 2025, Google unveiled its $15-billion, 1 gigawatt (GW) data centre project in the area in partnership with Adani Enterprises and Bharti Airtel-a feat that a top company executive said is proof of rising ease of business in India's data centre economy.

In an interview with Mint, Alexander Smith, principal for global infrastructure, Asia-Pacific at Google, said that a "single window mechanism" operated by Indian government bodies, both at ...