Google’s India AI Push: To Provide $8 Mn To CoEs, Offer Grants To Startups

From financing India’s AI research ecosystem to providing grants to emerging AI startups, Google announced a slew of initiatives to bolster the Indian AI ecosystem today. The tech giant committed $8 Mn to support four of the central government’s AI Centres of Excellence (CoE), as well as commitments to funding India-based AI startups and AI in healthcare. 

Google will provide the funding support to the following CoEs:

• TANUH at IISc Bangalore: AI for treatment of non-communicable diseases
• Airawat Research Foundation at IIT Kanpur: AI in governance
• AI Centre of Excellence for Education, IIT Madras: AI for education and teaching
• ANNAM.AI at IIT Ropar: AI for agriculture and farmer welfare

The funds would be used to enhance AI research at the CoEs moving forward. 

Indic LLMs Get Google’s Support

Besides, it also shared plans to invest $2 Mn to set up a new Indic Language Technologies Research Hub at IIT Bombay in order to help develop AI that serves India’s linguistic diversity.

Important to mention that the central government, under the IndiaAI Mission, is actively promoting the development of indigenous, Indic-LLMs to achieve “sovereign AI” for some time now.

In 2025, the Centre significantly accelerated its push for Indic LLMs by selecting a group of startups and entities to build homegrown foundational LLMs under the INR 10,372 Cr IndiaAI Mission. 

The first wave of selections featured Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, which was tasked with building India’s first sovereign LLM from scratch, Soket AI Labs, which is developing a massive 120-Bn parameter open-source model, alongside Gnani.ai and Gan.ai, which are focusing on advanced voice AI and multilingual “superhuman” text-to-speech capabilities, respectively.

The tech giant will provide $50K grants to Gnani.AI and CoRover.AI to support their efforts to build voice AI models.

To help developers build and scale indigenous AI applications, Google said it would upload 22 of its Gemma models to AI Kosh, the India AI Mission’s open data and model platform. 

Promoting AI In Healthcare

It also announced a series of measures to promote the use of AI in healthcare. It committed $400K to integrate AI into India’s digital public infrastructure, using its MedGemma open-source models to improve healthcare delivery and patient outcomes. 

In this, Lenskart-backed Ajna Lens will work with experts from AIIMS to build models that will support India-specific use cases in dermatology and OPD triaging. “The models built through this collaboration will contribute to India’s digital public infrastructure, and their outcomes will be made available to the ecosystem,” Google said. 

Tech Giants’ India Push

The tech giant’s slew of India investments come shortly after other big tech firms committed investments to India’s AI plans. Microsoft announced plans to invest $17.5 Bn in India’s cloud and AI infrastructure over the next four years – marking the company’s largest investment ever in Asia. This is after it had already said it would invest $3 Bn to accelerate AI skilling and adoption by the end of 2026. Amazon also said it would invest over $35 Bn to build India’s AI capabilities. 

Earlier this year, Google also announced that it will spend $15 Bn to build its first India-based AI hub and data centre in Visakhapatnam.

Global tech giants’ AI spending is just part of the bigger picture. Investment in AI is forecasted to grow more than twice as fast as overall tech spending in India and generate more than $115 Bn by the end of 2027.

AI firms are also offering their products for free to Indian users. OpenAI has offered Indian users one year of free access to their ChatGPT Go chatbot, while Perplexity and Google are making their AI products free via partnerships with telcos Airtel and Reliance Jio, respectively.