Google boosts India's AI ambition with Gemini localization, developer support
A key announcement was the localization of onshore processing for Gemini 2.5 Flash. This aims to provide faster, low-latency AI performance for Indian developers, particularly in regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, and governance.
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Google announced several initiatives aimed at advancing India's artificial intelligence capabilities and supporting its developer community at Google I/O Connect India 2025 on Wednesday.
A key announcement was the localization of onshore processing for Gemini 2.5 Flash. This aims to provide faster, low-latency AI performance for Indian developers, particularly in regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, and governance.
Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind, stated, "Indian developers are literally writing the next chapter of India's success story, using AI capabilities to build real-world applications that are reaching millions of businesses and people across India and the world."
Google also highlighted its commitment to India's developer ecosystem. The company reported that its Play and Android platforms generated ₹4 lakh crore in revenue and created 35 lakh jobs in 2024. Additionally, Google introduced agentic AI tools and optimized templates within Firebase Studio, designed to enable developers to build and deploy full-stack AI applications with increased speed and efficiency.
For mobile commerce, Google expanded access to over 250 million mapped places globally and launched India-specific pricing for Google Maps UI components. AI-powered summaries in the Places API will assist developers in creating location-based services for Indian users.
Furthering India's AI ambitions, Google is collaborating with three India AI Mission startups—Sarvam, Soket AI, and Gnani—on Make-in-India AI models based on Gemma. Sarvam's "Sarvam-Translate" model was cited as an example of this work. In partnership with IIT Bombay's BharatGen, Google is also working to advance ASR and TTS models for Indic languages.
To support the Indian game development community, Google launched the 'Google Play x Unity Game Developer Training' program in collaboration with Unity and GDAI. This program will initially target 500 Indian developers, offering over 30 hours of specialized training across various game development roles.
The Gen AI Exchange Hackathon was also highlighted, encouraging developers to apply AI skills to real-world challenges. During the event, startups including Sarvam, InVideo, Glance, and Nykaa showcased solutions developed using Google's AI models.
