Google setting up full stack AI hub in Visakhapatnam, says Sundar Pichai

Visakhapatnam: "It is wonderful to be back in India. Every time I visit, I am struck by the pace of change and today is no different," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Addressing world leaders gathered at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Thursday the Google CEO said when he was a student, he often took the Coromandel Express train from Chennai up to IIT Kharagpur. To get there they passed through Visakhapatnam, a quiet and modest coastal city, brimming with potential, he said.

Now, in that same city, Google is establishing a full-stack AI hub, part of their $15 billion infrastructure investment in India. When finished, this hub will house gigawatt-scale compute and a new international subsea cable gateway, bringing jobs and the benefits of cutting-edge AI to people and businesses across India.
Sitting on that train, he never imagined Vizag becoming a global AI hub. Just as he couldn't have imagined that he'd one day be spending time with teams figuring out how to put data centers into space, he said.

He said they are still working on Waymo ride model on busy Indian roads. And no technology has him dreaming bigger than AI. It is the biggest platform shift of their lifetime.

"We are on the cusp of hyper progress and new discoveries that can help emerging economies leapfrog legacy gaps. But that outcome is neither guaranteed nor automatic. To build AI that is truly helpful for everyone, we must pursue it boldly, approach it responsibly and work through this defining moment together," Sundar Pichai said.
For fifty years predicting protein structures was a grand challenge ' and a blind spot that stalled drug discovery. Demis Hassabis and his team at Google DeepMind asked an audacious question: 'how could we use AI to solve this?' That question led to AlphaFold. This breakthrough didn't just win a Nobel Prize; it compressed decades of research into a database that is now open to the world. Today, over three million researchers in more than 190 countries are using it to develop malaria vaccines, fight antibiotic resistance and much more, he said.

Isomorphic Labs is taking this further into drug discovery, re-imagining what it takes to bring life-saving medicines faster with AI.

"We must be equally bold in tackling problems in regions that have lacked access to technology," he said

El Salvador, where Google has partnered with the Government to bring affordable, AI-powered diagnosis and treatment to thousands who could never afford to see a doctor, he said

In India, where they work together is helping farmers protect their livelihoods in the face of monsoons. Last summer, for the first time, the Indian government sent AI-powered forecasts to millions of farmers, possible in part because of their Neural GCM model, the Google CEO said

He said language inclusion is another exciting ambition. In Ghana, they are collaborating with universities and NGOs to expand research and open-source tools across more than twenty African languages, he added .

He said he mentioned their Vizag investment, and they have others in Thailand, Malaysia and more. They are also building a vast network of subsea fiber optic cables, including four new systems between the U.S. and India., as part of their America-India Connect Initiative, he said