New Delhi: Leading tech giants, including Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc and Amazon, have promised over $25 billion dollars worth of investment in India — a development that comes on the back of their interaction with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the last leg of his three-day official state visit to the United States.
Alphabet Inc Chief Executive Officer Sunder Pichai, whose company Google had promised a total investment of $10 billion in India through ‘India Digitisation Fund’ in 2020, announced his company will be opening its global fintech operation centre in Gujarat. The ‘India Digitisation Fund’ is Google’s commitment to invest USD 10 billion (approximately Rs 75,000 crores) in India over the next five-seven years through a mix of “equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure and ecosystem investments”, according to the company’s announcement in 2020.
Meanwhile, E-commerce giant Amazon unveiled plans to invest $15 billion more in India, taking its total investment in the country to $26 billion. According to a company statement, the tech giant also said it is on track to reaching its goals to digitise 10 million small businesses, enable $20 billion in exports, and create 2 million jobs in India by 2025.
The development came after Modi and US President Joe Biden held a meeting with leading executives of some of America’s top companies in the fields of tech and semiconductors, among others. The meeting, which the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) described as a “hi-tech handshake”, was held at the White House and was attended by Apple’s CEO Tim Cook; Revathi Advaithi, chief of electronics multinational Flex; Sam Altman, CEO of artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI; Mark Douglas, president and CEO of chemical manufacturers FMC Corporation; and Satya Nadella, chief of tech giant Microsoft.
Biden, who gifted Modi with a t-shirt with the words ‘The future is AI America and India’, later called on CEOs to help expand India-US tech partnership to new fields — including biotechnology and quantum.
Google’s and Amazon’s announcements came two days after American semiconductor giant Micron Technology Inc announced plans to invest $825 million in India to build a new semiconductor assembly and test facility in Gujarat after a meeting between Modi and Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra.
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Indian companies investing in the US
Meanwhile, three Indian companies — Indian solar panel maker VSK Energy, Epsilon Carbon and JSW Steel — have announced investments of up to $2 billion in the US in areas of renewable energy and clean mobility supply chains.
VSK Energy — a joint venture between Kolkata-based solar panel maker Vikram Solar and New York-based sustainability-focused private equity firms Phalanx Impact Partners and Das & Co — announced a $1.5 billion investment for developing a solar panel manufacturing unit. The company plans to set up a factory in Colorado next year.
Mumbai-based Epsilon Carbon plans to invest $650 million in a greenfield electric vehicle battery component factory while JSW Steel plans to invest $120 million at its steel plant in Ohio.
All three companies are likely capitalise on incentives under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act — a law that aims to curb inflation by possibly reducing the federal government’s budget deficit, lower prescription drug prices and boosting American energy production while promoting clean energy.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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