Despite tariff tensions, India critical growth area for Google, says country head Preeti Lobana

Despite uncertainty over US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, India remains a critical growth area for Google. Speaking to Moneycontrol, Google India’s Country Manager and Vice President Preeti Lobana emphasised India’s strategic importance for the tech giant’s global plans. “India is deeply critical for us,” she said. Pointing out that India is looked at as a “major growth area,” she stressed that Google remains committed to “doing good for India on systemic challenges.” Asked whether trade and tariff tensions could affect Google’s plans, Lobana said, “Stuff will happen around. We are deeply committed.”

Read full Q&A here

Google’s India push

She highlighted the company’s ongoing and upcoming investments, including the recently announced $15 billion investment for a data centre in Visakhapatnam, the recent commissioning of its largest ever India office in Bengaluru and the Hyderabad opening of the company’s first engineering safety centre in Asia. “You know we made a recent announcement about investing $15 billion in our gigawatt scale data center in Visakhapatnam,” said Lobana. “It's undersea cables, it's renewable energy. We announced the opening of our largest ever office in India in Ananta in Bengaluru. That’s a very large office. We recently launched the first-ever in Asia Google Safety Engineering Center in India - with a focus on privacy and safety. It is the first ever in Asia. So, we are continuing to invest. Some things happen around the ecosystem but we continue to be on our path to be with India and proceed and grow.”

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Elaborating on the Vizag investment and its significance, Lobana stressed that “it is a very big statement on our part to say we believe in India.” She emphasised that “it is the single largest investment of its kind outside the US. That tells you the strategic importance and criticality of India and the Vizag data centre. It is a one-gigawatt data center but it is also about the commitments we are making for clean green energy: adding power to the grid, harnessing solar, wind and other sources of power.”

On India languages and localisation on AI

Outlining the contours of Google’s India approach, Lobana said that the “vision of Viksit Bharat, the honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision, and the India AI Mission are all very powerful statements on where we want to go. We are looking to do good for India on systemic challenges in terms of how AI can help in complex areas like healthcare and agriculture..”

Lobana said that Google is looking at how it can embed AI into its products and services so that it becomes the lever that helps India leapfrog ahead on its systemic challenges. "We tend to look at AI sometimes from a consumer point of view like a chatbot but the next step for us is how do we make them locally relevant whether from Indic languages point of view or some other context," said Lobana. She pointed to the example of how Indian women use ‘gond ke laddoo’ for post-natal maternal care, noting that an AI model trained overseas would struggle to understand such cultural nuances. “Now any model built overseas won't have that context when you talk about post-natal maternal care,” she said. “So, we build all that into our model so that it becomes locally aware in terms of Indic languages but also culturally aware. How do we do this for open-source models like Gemma is a priority so India’s vastness and complexity become an advantage and we can show to the world that this is a model that can scale to the Global South and other countries.”

Lauding the Government of India’s ambitious AI mission, Lobana said that it is “amazing to see that the government has a clear vision and it has clear pillars — whether we are talking about compute, democratising access to AI or privacy and security. In each of these pillars, we see ourselves as partners, not just with the Government of India but in enabling the wider ecosystem.”

On India’s startups ecosystem, Lobana said that Google remains “very bullish.” “It is wonderful to see the vibrancy in the startup ecosystem Investment cycles may go up and down but, at Google, we take a long-term view.We are here believing in India, believing in the need for deep tech, seeing the amazing talent, making those investments, not just with dollars but with our expertise.”

Watch the full interview here