Alphabet Inc’s Google on Monday said it plans to invest $10 billion in India over next five to seven years as the search giant looks to help accelerate adoption of digital services in the key overseas market, Reuters reports.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, unveiled India Digitization Fund through which the company will be making investments in the country.
“We’ll do this through a mix of equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure and ecosystem investments,” Pichai said via video conference at the company’s annual Google for India event. “This is a reflection of our confidence in the future of India and its digital economy”.
The new $10 billion investment was the largest Google had done in India, the Google CEO noted.
“We’re particularly focused on making sure the internet expands beyond English and other vernacular languages. That’s an important angle we’ve looked at,” he told Reuters in an interview.
Google wants to bolster the growth of internet in India, which currently has over 500 million active users, and help get another 500 million people online, Pichai said.
Beyond investments via the fund, Google, would also focus on areas like artificial intelligence and education in India, he added.
Indian-born Pichai joined Google in 2004 and replaced company co-founder Larry Page as CEO of parent Alphabet Inc last year.
The U.S. tech group, whose Android mobile operating system powers a bulk of India’s roughly 500 million smartphones, will continue to work with manufacturers to build low-cost devices so that more and more people can access the internet, another Google executive said.
