AP Govt Mulling Creating Data City In Vizag On Lines Of Cyberabad

Visakhapatnam: The TDP-led NDA Coalition in the State is keen on developing a data city to promote AI and other deeptech in an area of 500 acres on the city outskirts to transform Visakhapatnam into Cyberabad of Andhra Pradesh.

Drawing inspiration from the transformation of Hyderabad as a mega metropolis after the successfully developing hitec city in Madhapur and its neighbourhood during the tenure AP Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, when he was the CM of the undivided State in mid-1990s, the coalition has launched an exercise to offer land and other concessions to big ticket projects in deeptech so as to make Visakhapatnam the IT capital of AP.

TDP national general secretary and IT, Electronics and Education Minister Nara Lokesh, after holding talks in Davos with Temasek Holdings to set up a data centre and a park in Visakhapatnam, urged Ravi Kumar, CEO of IT major Cognizant to open a campus in the City of Destiny. "We wish to bring major players to this city so as to make it a hub for IT, deeptech, data and Global Capability Centers (GCCs)," Lokesh said during a conference he attended here recently.

In the proposed data city near Visakhapatnam, the government is planning to allot 50 acres to Google Cloud to set up an AI data city as per MoU signed with the organisation in December, 2024, 30 acres to TCS, which agreed to open a 10,000-seater development centre and others who want to grab the opportunity on first come first serve basis.

After his talks with Google Cloud MD Bikram Singh in New Delhi, Lokesh said on X: "We discussed the upcoming Google Cloud Data City in Visakhapatnam and its transformative impact on the IT landscape.

I assured them that the AP Government will fast-track approvals, land allocations, and policy decisions, with the AP Economic Development Board actively facilitating the process."

Lokesh held detailed talks with Bikram Singh, Google India Director (Public Sector and EdTech) Asish and their team on Wednesday and they discussed the progress regarding establishing data city in in Visakhapatnam. Asking the Google Cloud heads to accelerate the process of setting up their project as it will totally revamp the facet of Visakhapatnam, Lokesh expressed the hope that the Data City will be a game-changer for establishing an environment system for startups and to design the world-class applications in AI.

In his response, Bikram Singh appreciated the efforts being made by the Andhra Pradesh Government for digital transformation and said that all the necessary measures will be taken to speed up the process for setting up the Google Cloud Data City.