Google, the company behind the world’s No.1 internet search engine, is planning to set up back-office operations at a special economic zone in Andhra Pradesh in India and the investment could go as high as $1 billion, government officials say.
This is the second attempt by the company, after infrastructure-related problems forced it to call off an earlier plan in March this year.
The research report, released early this month, claims that the Mountain View, Calif., search engine giant is interested in investing in the city of Hyderabad, one of the largest urban areas in India and an emerging hub of IT and biotechnology.
"Google is planning to invest an additional $1 billion in India beyond its current investment in its R&D center in Bangalore," said Robert Peck of Bear Stearns. "Our conversation with the company indicated that Google is definitely interested in investing in Hyderabad but unable to confirm the amount of investment, which could be significantly lower."
Though no further details of the project are available, industry sources say that the Indian centre will be the company’s second such facility in Asia and seventh globally.
They went on to build that farm in Taiwan. The server farm will envisage an investment running into hundreds of crores of rupees.
Google is so cagey that people are yet to see a picture of Google’s data centers anywhere in the world. Server farms hosts websites and also act as a store house for all information available on the internet.
Google’s proposal to set up a server farm in India comes on the back of increasing number of internet users in the country. Also, it will further boost the country as a preferred destination for competing companies like Microsoft and Yahoo.
Google will store all the data from its users – right form e-mails, blogs, photos, documents and chat records, and make it available to users when they demand it. A local server will allow users to access the internet faster and also save on access costs from international locations when volumes are likely to increase.
According to Juxt Consulting, Google is still behind when it comes to brand recall when compared to Yahoo! but has been rapidly catching up when it comes to its email user base.
Today, storage capabilities of software firms has become a major issue and individual data centre operators and giants like Microsoft and Yahoo are investing over $4 billion in building bigger and faster datacenters.
Building server farms is a hot activity in the US as software giants like Microsoft have decided to move most of their applications to the internet.
Says an industry expert: “There is good chance that others might follow if Google does.” However, Google will have to cross a few hurdles before setting up farms in India.
The company’s proposal has been cleared by the Indian government’s Board of Approvals.
Other investments cleared by the Board of Approvals
Other foreign investments cleared included Dell’s and Accenture’s. Dell’s investment is also likely to be made in Andhra Pradesh, while Accenture is looking at Karnataka.
The others in the list include Cisco, SAP, Intel, AMD and Microsoft committing over $1 billion-plus investments.
The proposals of several large Indian IT firms for setting up SEZs which were also cleared included two zones of Infosys in Pune and Mysore, and proposals of Wipro, HCL, Cognizant and NIIT.
A knowledge city being set up by technocrats in Bangalore was also approved.