This is part of broader efforts from Google as it continues to invest and grow its footprint in India, Google Cloud Asia Pacific vice-president Bikram Singh Bedi told ET on the sidelines of the Google I/O Connect event here on Wednesday.
“A key part of investments is partnerships, the local customers, with the local partners to drive things forward, as far as AI from Google and Google Cloud are concerned,” he said.
The company is also working with enterprises and startups where it is seeing momentum.
Speaking at the event, Preeti Lobana, country manager, Google India, said to build endearing companies, startups need to solve fundamental issues in areas such as healthcare, climate and sustainability using deep AI solutions. Building trust, privacy and security from day one is also key.
Google has been expanding in the country in recent years. The US-based tech giant currently operates two data centres, in Mumbai and Delhi, and is reportedly in talks to acquire land in Mumbai for another data centre. Bedi did not respond to queries about expanding its data centre presence in India.
India is second largest in terms of active developers for Google. According to a report by Public First, the Indian app publishers earned Rs 4 lakh crore through Android and Google Play in India.
Google is integrating Gemini 2.5 Pro with its developer studio Firebase, which will allow developers to use multimodal prompts. Its open-source AI model, Gemma 3, supports 140 languages, including six Indian languages.
Indian startups Sarvam, Soket Labs and Gnani.ai are using Gemma to build AI models for various use cases. Sarvam, for instance, has built a translation model using Gemma.
Last week, Google offered a one-year free subscription of Google AI Pro worth Rs 19,500 to students, where they will be able to access a suite of products including Gemini 2.5 Pro, Notebook LLM and video model Veo 3.