Google pledges $15 million, unveils new collaborations to boost India's AI research and developer community

Manish Gupta, Google

Google on December 16 pledged around $15 million in funding commitments and announced new collaborations to bolster India’s artificial intelligence (AI) research, developer, and startup ecosystem, with a focus on healthcare, agriculture, and sustainability, aimed at addressing large-scale social needs.

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, announced $8 million in funding to support research at the government-established AI Centres of Excellence.

The centres include Translational AI for Networked Universal Healthcare (TANUH) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru; the Airawat Research Foundation at IIT Kanpur; the AI Centre of Excellence for Education at IIT Madras; and Alliance for Next-Gen Nourishment through Agriculture Modernization (ANNAM.AI) at IIT Ropar.

TANUH at IISc Bangalore will focus on developing scalable AI solutions for effective treatment of non-communicable diseases while Airawat Research Foundation at IIT Kanpur will work on AI research aimed at transforming urban governance.

AI Centre of Excellence for Education, IIT Madras will work on developing solutions to enhance learning and teaching outcomes while ANNAM.AI at IIT Ropar will focus on developing data-driven solutions for agriculture and farmer welfare.

At a company event in New Delhi, Google executives stated that the internet giant has supported nearly 1,000 years of PhD-level research work across more than 25 leading research institutions, including premier institutes. The global PhD Fellowship programme has also supported 166 Indian PhD students to date.

“India is approaching artificial intelligence as a strategic national capability, not as a short-term technology trend. The four AI Centres of Excellence have been conceived as a coordinated national research mission, advancing foundational research, responsible AI, and applied solutions that serve public purpose, and contributing to our larger aspiration of Viksit Bharat 2047," said Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

"Building a globally competitive AI ecosystem requires not only public investment, but also strong institutional leadership and long-term partnerships with industry," the union minister added.

Google also announced a $2 million founding contribution to establish a new Indic Language Technologies Research Hub at IIT Bombay, set up in memory of Professor Pushpak Bhattacharyya, a pioneer in Indic language technologies and a Visiting Researcher at Google DeepMind.

In addition, the tech giant is providing $50,000 of funding to Gnani.AI and CoRover.AI to support their efforts to include more of the Indian diaspora in AI. Both startups have been selected by the IndiaAI mission to build the next generation of Make-in-India AI models.

These firms have been using Google's open-weight AI model, Gemma, to build Voice AI models and e-governance–focused models serving Indic language solutions.

Google is also providing a $50,000 grant to IIT-Bombay that is leveraging Gemma to process Indic language health governance and policy documents to establish a ‘India-Centric Trait Database’ containing information on diseases, phenotypes, and genetic conditions relevant to the Indian population.

Google stated that it has uploaded all 22 Gemma models onto AIKosh, IndiaAI Mission’s open data and model platform, to increase access to its open models.

The company is also committing $400,000 funding to support new collaborations that will leverage MedGemma for the development of India’s Health Foundation model that aims to improve the efficiency of healthcare providers and improve patient outcomes across India. MedGemma is a collection of Gemma 3 variants designed to understand and process medical text and images.

As part of this initiative, deeptech startup Ajna Lens will work with experts from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to build models that will support India-specific use cases in Dermatology and OPD Triaging. These models will contribute to India’s Digital Public Infrastructure and their outcomes will be made accessible to the ecosystem, the company stated.

“This collaboration between AIIMS and Google brings India closer to an AI-driven dermatology solution rooted in our own population’s skin tones and conditions. It sets the stage for more accurate, inclusive, and globally relevant healthcare AI,” said Somesh Gupta, Professor, Dermatology & Venereology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

Researchers, AI experts, and clinicians from IISc will also explore using AI models for broader clinical applications.

"From foundational research to ecosystem deployment to scaled impact, our full-stack approach is equipping the country to lead a global AI-powered future, with innovations from India’s labs benefiting billions across the world,” said Manish Gupta, Senior Research Director, Google DeepMind.

Google is also working with the National Health Authority (NHA) to deploy its AI capabilities to convert millions of fragmented, unstructured medical records such as doctor's clinical and progress notes into the international, machine-readable FHIR standard.

This move is expected to help patients understand their medical information better, reduce documentation burden on patients and hospitals, and inform better data-driven policy decisions for India’s public healthcare strategy, the firm stated.

Google is also working with NHA to bring over 400,000 NHA-registered health facilities, including hospitals, clinics, and diagnostic labs, on Google Maps and Search, allowing people to find and navigate to their nearest health centers.

Separately, Google.org is providing $4.5 million to Wadhwani AI to support multilingual AI-powered applications for health and agriculture.

Of this, $2.5 million will be used to pilot HealthVaani, a large language model (LLM)-based conversational AI assistant launched in partnership with the Ministries of Health and Family Welfare and Women and Child Development to support ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) and Anganwadi workers.

The remainder $2 million will be provided to help develop and deploy Garuda, an Indian language model for agriculture. Garuda will power AgriVaani, a multilingual, AI-driven smartphone application that will offer farmers and agri-workers in India precise, contextually relevant advice on crop and livestock management, pest detection, and climate-smart practices.

“Frontline workers, whether ASHAs, Anganwadi workers, or farmers, are the backbone of India’s health and food systems. Our focus has always been to provide them with practical and trustworthy solutions designed for real-world conditions," said Shekar Sivubramanian, Head, Wadhwani AI.

The support from Google.org enables us to responsibly leverage cutting-edge AI to develop multilingual, accessible solutions like HealthVaani and AgriVaani, which can effectively augment human effort at scale.”

Google has also struck a partnership with ReNew Energy to support a new 150 megawatt (MW) solar project in Rajasthan as part of its sustainability push. Under a long-term agreement, Google will receive environmental attribute certificates (EACs) and allocate them to its value chain emissions.

This partnership builds on the company's prior collaborations with Adani Group and Clean Max, which added 186 MW of wind and solar power to India’s grid, and contributes to India’s 2030 goal of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel-based electricity. Google stated that it will also engage with key suppliers to boost clean energy adoption.