Google is ramping up its AI ambitions to take on Microsoft and Amazon in India’s fast-growing cloud market. The company recently announced a $15 billion investment to build an AI data centre in Andhra Pradesh, its largest-ever commitment in the country. This move comes amid surging demand for Google Cloud services, driven by AI-powered solutions.
India, however, remains a small slice of the global cloud market. Gartner estimates that Indian businesses will spend $4.8 billion on data centres by end-2025, just 1 percent of the global $475 billion. In overall cloud services, India’s projected spend of $160 billion this year accounts for only 3 percent of the global $5.4 trillion. Google’s bet is clear: AI will be the differentiator in a market where hyperscalers like Amazon and Microsoft dominate.
For CEO Sundar Pichai, this aggressive push into AI and cloud is part of a vision he has championed for years: Making technology universally accessible while ensuring trust and safety. In a conversation with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Dreamforce 2025 at San Francisco in October, Pichai shared how his personal journey—from waiting five years for a rotary phone in Chennai to leading one of the world’s most influential tech companies—shapes Google’s approach to AI.
Pichai grew up in a modest household, in Chennai, where education and curiosity were prized. “My mom never went past high school because of financial circumstances, but she was an avid reader,” he said. “That’s where my love of learning came from.” His grandfather’s influence and strong family values shaped his worldview: Knowledge as a path to opportunity.
Pichai recalls how scarcity shaped his worldview. “I waited five years to get a rotary phone because the government made it at that time, and it was a long waiting list,” he said. “But the minute the phone came to the house, we were one of the first in the neighbourhood [with a phone]. People would come to the house, call their families—it kind of created a community around it. Access was opportunity.”
After IIT, Pichai headed to Stanford, drawn by the mystique of Silicon Valley. “I literally wanted to be in Silicon Valley because I was fascinated by semiconductors,” he said. “As a kid growing up, you’re interested in semiconductors—it’s a wonder that you could turn sand into the substrate of the digital age.”
His early fascination with hardware later intersected with software ambitions. “I was very inspired by the One Laptop per Child project from MIT,” he said. “In some ways, I can directly link that to my work on Chromebooks many years later.” That vision of democratising access to computing eventually scaled through Android, putting a “computer in your hands” for billions worldwide.
In 2004, Pichai left Applied Materials for Google, just weeks before its IPO. His first big bet? A browser. “I remember vividly Eric [Schmidt] telling us, ‘Are you crazy? You know what it takes to build a browser?’ We still did it anyway,” he laughed. That browser became Chrome, now the world’s most popular.
But his deeper motivation lay in Google’s mission. “The phrase ‘to make information universally accessible and useful’—that’s why I joined Google,” he said. “It resonated so much with me.”
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Pichai’s tenure as CEO has been defined by a pivot to AI. “One of the first things when I became CEO was to drive the shift to being an AI-first company,” he said. That journey began in 2017 with Google’s TPU chips and has accelerated with Gemini, the company’s flagship AI model.
Reflecting on OpenAI’s rise, Pichai was candid: “Credit to OpenAI—they put it out first. In consumer internet, it’s not unusual. But when ChatGPT launched, contrary to what people outside felt, I was excited. I knew the window had shifted. We were incredibly well positioned, but we had to seize the moment.”
Pichai emphasised Google’s integrated approach to AI: “We decided to take a full-stack approach—from infrastructure and chips to world-class research teams and models. We built our own [Tensor Processing Units] TPUs, we have Google Research, Google Brain, Google DeepMind. Everything in the company was AI-native.”
That strategy is now visible in Gemini’s rapid evolution. “We have Gemini 2.5 out, and we’re working on Gemini 3.0 for release this year,” he said. “The progress has been extraordinary, and 2026 will be even more exciting than 2025.”
Asked about the next decade, Pichai didn’t hesitate. “We are definitely going to have digital super intelligence as a collaborator for all of us. That is going to be a reality,” he said. He’s equally bullish on quantum computing: “I think, in three to five years, we will have that moment where, from a cryptographic standpoint, we have to adapt to quantum. And, in 10 years, quantum will be real.”
He even hinted at breakthroughs beyond AI: “We believe in deep fundamental R&D. Our quantum computing team plans to have commercially available, real at-scale quantum computers in a few years.”
Pichai also teased the return of Google Glass and the promise of brain-machine interfaces. “The Glass dream has never gone away,” he said. “Now that you truly have seamless AI with intuitive interfaces—voice, gestures, vision—the multimodality of AI makes Glass possible again.”
On neural tech, he was optimistic: “What Elon [Musk] and team are doing with Neuralink is super inspiring. When technology helps people with real disabilities communicate again, it’s some of the most moving things I see.”
Yet, amid the excitement, Pichai stressed responsibility. “Our job is to be good stewards of this technology, bring it in a way that really benefits society at scale,” he said. “Our responsibility as leaders is to make sure we are leaving the world in a better position for the next generation than what we inherited.”
(The writer was at Dreamforce 2025 in San Francisco on the invitation of Salesforce)
First Published: Nov 13, 2025, 13:31
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