Sundar Pichai outlines Google’s AI strategy and India investment at AI summit

Google CEO Sundar Pichai

• Google to build a major AI hub in Visakhapatnam, India
• Pichai highlights AI's potential and responsible use.
• Google's AI tools aid farmers, healthcare, and language inclusion

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When Sundar Pichai took the stage at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi today, he was not just speaking as the CEO of Google, but as someone retracing his own journey through modern India. Thanking Prime Minister Narendra Modi and global leaders in attendance, Pichai framed artificial intelligence as both the defining technology of the era and a test of how responsibly the world can deploy it.

Pichai opened with a personal anecdote, recalling train journeys on the Coromandel Express from Chennai to IIT Kharagpur, passing through what was once a “quiet and modest” Visakhapatnam. That same city, he said, will soon host a major Google full-stack AI hub, part of a $15 billion infrastructure push across India. The Vizag facility will include gigawatt-scale compute capacity and a new international subsea cable gateway, positioning India as a core node in the global AI economy.

The speech leaned heavily on the idea that AI represents the largest platform shift of our lifetimes, capable of triggering what Pichai described as “hyperprogress”. He pointed to breakthroughs such as AlphaFold, developed by Google DeepMind, which solved the long-standing problem of protein structure prediction and is now used by millions of researchers worldwide. That work, he argued, shows how AI can compress decades of scientific effort into tools that are openly accessible and globally useful.

Beyond science, Pichai highlighted real-world deployments aimed at emerging economies. In India, AI-powered weather and monsoon forecasting has already been used to send alerts to millions of farmers, helping them protect crops and livelihoods. Elsewhere, Google-backed initiatives are being used for affordable medical diagnostics, language inclusion across African languages and climate resilience, said Pichai.

Responsibility was the second major pillar of the address. Pichai warned against allowing today’s digital divide to harden into an AI divide, stressing the need for investment in compute, connectivity and skills. He cited Google’s expanding subsea cable network between India and the US, along with training programmes that have already reached more than 100 million people globally. Trust, he said, remains essential, pointing to tools like SynthID designed to help verify the authenticity of digital content.

The final message was one of collaboration. Governments, companies and institutions must work together as regulators, innovators and adopters if AI is to deliver broad-based benefits. From smarter public services to new kinds of jobs that do not yet exist, Pichai argued that the opportunity is generational, but success is not automatic.  "We have the opportunity to improve lives at a once-in-generation scale. I know we have the capability to do this. And looking at the leaders here today, I believe we also have the will," said Pichai.