Google deepens AI push in India with IIT Madras collaboration

Google Cloud has announced a significant expansion of its AI computing capacity in India, aimed at empowering enterprises, developers, and public sector organisations to build and deploy advanced artificial intelligence models locally, as per a report by Moneycontrol.

As part of the initiative, Google Cloud and Google DeepMind have partnered with IIT Madras’ AI4Bharat to launch Indic Arena, a platform designed to benchmark AI models on Indian language tasks. The platform will be independently operated by the AI4Bharat research centre and will allow users to anonymously evaluate and rank AI models based on their performance across Indian languages and culturally relevant use cases. Google Cloud is supporting the project by providing cloud credits to power its infrastructure.

The company informed that the expanded local compute will run on Google’s AI Hypercomputer architecture, which features the latest Trillium TPUs. This will enable customers to train and serve Gemini models within India while complying with data residency and digital sovereignty requirements. Google added that the move will bolster high-performance, low-latency AI applications across a wide range of sectors.

Google further stated that it is also introducing more of its latest AI capabilities with full data residency support. These include batch processing for Gemini 2.5 Flash for large-scale tasks, a preview of Document AI to automate document workflows, and grounding support using real-time data from Google Maps to improve location-specific results.

Mitesh Khapra, Associate Professor at IIT Madras, said that AI4Bharat’s mission is to develop AI systems tailored to India’s unique linguistic and cultural context. He explained that Indic Arena would serve as a neutral and standardised benchmark to measure model performance across various Indian languages, and expressed that the support from Google Cloud in providing the initial compute power was crucial to bringing this independent, public-facing platform to life for the wider Indian AI community.

Google stated that it is inviting startups, universities, enterprises, and government institutions to make use of the expanded Gemini capacity in Vertex AI, encouraging them to contribute towards building AI systems that reflect India’s linguistic richness and cultural diversity.