AI Impact Summit: Google launches game-changing America-India Connect plan with $15 billion backing

Google has recently announced $15 billion investment to establish foundational AI infrastructure in India, and have been building subsea cables in the Pacific, Africa and around the world.

Speaking on the investment, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, "At the AI impact summit our message is clear: we believe India is going to have an extraordinary trajectory with AI, and we want to be a partner. To help, we have launched new America-India Connect subsea cable routes building on our $15B investment in India’s infrastructure, including a full-stack AI Hub in Vizag.

"We're also rolling out a new AI Certificate, a @GoogleDeepMind partnership to unlock discoveries in science & education, live speech-to-speech translation for 70+ languages and more."

What are the initiatives?

A $30 million Google.org Global AI for Government Innovation Impact Challenge to support partnerships that transform public services using AI — from everyday essential services to complex societal challenges.

A $30 million Google.org AI for Science Impact Challenge to support researchers globally who are using AI to drive scientific breakthroughs.

Google DeepMind establishes a new partnership with Indian government bodies and local institutions to unlock new discoveries in science and education. This includes providing access to its frontier AI for Science models and powering innovation hubs with GenAI assistants, among other projects. This forms part of Google DeepMind’s broader National Partnerships for AI initiative — working with governments to broaden access to frontier AI capabilities for national priorities.

The Google Center for Climate Technology in collaboration with the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, to accelerate research and adoption of scalable AI-powered climate solutions.

Creating opportunity and capacity to solve problems with AI skills

Equipping people and civil servants with AI skills empowers them to use AI tools to solve problems at their job or for their community.

• An AI Professional Certificate program to help people all over the world learn how to use AI at work, in partnership with government bodies, education institutions and employers. This includes scholarships through nonprofits to broaden reach. In India, we're partnering with Wadhwani AI to bring this program to students and early career professionals.
• A landmark partnership with Karmayogi Bharat to accelerate Mission Karmayogi’s vision of building a future-ready civil service. Google Cloud provides the secure and resilient infrastructure for the iGOT Karmayogi platform that supports over 20 million public servants across 800+ districts. By digitizing and structuring legacy training repositories into searchable knowledge assets, and progressively enabling content in 18+ Indian languages, the partnership advances professional development and empowers officials to learn in their preferred language.
• This builds on efforts around the world partnering with governments to equip public officials, from providing AI tools to public officers in Malaysia to an AI Skilling Blueprint in Africa.

Building helpful products for everyone

• Reducing language barriers: New live speech-to-speech translation model erases language barriers by enabling real-time translated conversations in over 70 languages, including 10 Indic languages like Bengali, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. It intends to help people learn new languages with AI-powered speaking and listening practice, tailored to each person’s level and ability.
• Smarter search: In the coming weeks Google is enhancing the model that powers Search Live, our real-time voice and camera tool, so more people can ask questions about what they see in their own language, including Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese and more. It is also testing ways to make it easier to get helpful information from visual search even when the images aren't clear. Lens will detect blurry images and ask follow-up questions to improve accuracy of results.
• Personalized learning: For students in India, Google has recently added new self-study features and JEE Main practice tests to the Gemini app (also coming soon to AI Mode in Search), transforming how they can prepare for exams with tailored help. Both Gemini and AI Mode are growing rapidly across the globe, and India is among our top 3 countries for each.
• Investing in safeguards to protect people online: Since launching in November, Google's SynthID verification feature in Gemini App has been used over 20 million times in a range of languages, helping people identify Google AI-generated images, video and audio. And in Circle to Search and Lens, Google is now able to identify scam messages, helping millions of people avoid fraud.