Google is reportedly planning to invest $6 billion in a data center in southern India

Google will spend $6 billion to build a 1-gigawatt data center and its power infrastructure in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. This is the first investment of its kind in India by Alphabet (GOOGL.O), according to government sources on Wednesday.

Two government sources in Andhra Pradesh who are directly involved with the matter told Reuters that the data center will be built in the port city of Visakhapatnam and will be powered by green energy worth $2 billion.

The search engine giant’s data center will have the most space and cost the most money of any in Asia. It is part of a multibillion-dollar plan to build more data centers in Southeast Asian countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

In April, Alphabet said it was still planning to spend about $75 billion this year to expand its data center capacity, even though U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff attack had caused economic uncertainty.

Alphabet didn’t answer right away when Reuters asked for a statement.

Andhra Pradesh’s IT minister, Nara Lokesh, didn’t say anything about the Google investment while he was in Singapore to talk about investments with business and government leaders.

He said, “We’ve made some public announcements, like Sify.” Sify is a 550-MW data center that Sify Technologies (SIFY.O) wants to build in the state. “Some news items have not been made public yet.” We’ll make those announcements in October.”

INVESTMENT DRIVE IN THE STATE AFTER THE SPLIT

As a result of the 2014 split, Andhra Pradesh, which is led by a close ally of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lost its city, Hyderabad, and a major source of income to the new state of Telangana.

Andhra Pradesh has been trying to get capital ever since to help its finances deal with its heavy debt and large social spending.

Lokesh said that Andhra Pradesh has already finished investing in data centers with a total capacity of 1.6 GW. He also said that the state wants to build 6 GW of data centers over the next five years, up from almost nothing right now.

The first 1.6 GW of agreed-upon data centers should be up and running in the next 24 months, according to him. According to real estate firm Anarock, that would be more than the 1.4 GW that are currently in use across the whole country.

Also, we’re working on getting three landing spots for cables in Visakhapatnam. Lokesh said, “We want to build enough cable networks so that Mumbai has twice as many as it does now.”

Equipment that gets and sends data from underwater cables is kept in cable landing stations, which are usually close to data centers that need fast and reliable connections to global networks.

Additionally, Lokesh said that the government was planning to improve the state’s energy system to meet the long-term needs of data centers. He said that he thought the business that uses a lot of electricity would need as much as 10 GW of power generation capacity over the next five years.

“Majority will end up being actually green energy, and that’s the unique value proposition that we bring to the table,” said he.

However, some of the extra power will come from coal-fired plants because, as he said, data centers need stable, high-volume power all day.