Visakhapatnam, the AI coast: who gave up the land under India's biggest compute bet

Start at sea. According to a Tarluvada resident quoted by Frontline, the peak of Chukka Konda, the hill villagers call Star Hill, could once be seen from nearly 20 kilometres off the coast, and fishermen heading home used it to judge how far they had left to go. Inland, at its foot, lie fields. Some 50 landless Dalit families were assigned about 100 acres here in the 1970s, Frontline reports, and over the decades they levelled and planted roughly 100 acres more.

Rest of World describes the wider belt as mainly agricultural, known for paddy and mango orchards.

Since 28 April 2026, the slope behind those fields has been the start of what Google's partner AdaniConneX calls India's largest AI data centre campus. Visakhapatnam, long a port-and-steel city, has become the most consequential geography in India's compute build-out. The fight over who pays for that is no longer only on paper. It is in two courtrooms.

The coast: why the cables come here

Move the camera to the shoreline. Google's announcement on 14 October 2025 described a "multi-faceted investment of approximately USD 15 billion over five years (2026-2030)": gigawatt-scale data centres, a subsea cable network and clean energy. Bharti Airtel said the same day that it would build, with Google, a cable landing station to host Google's new international subsea cables.

At the groundbreaking, Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw spoke of "three subsea cables landing in Visakhapatnam". The PIB release from the event says they will connect via Australia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the United States. KPMG's July 2026 report lists Vizag's upcoming landing station as India's link to East Asia and the Pacific. That eastern gateway is the first reason Vizag is on the map. The physics of that is its own story: why data centres live by the sea.

Twenty-five kilometres up the Kolkata-Srikakulam highway is Paradesipalem. The Economic Times reported in November 2025, citing one person familiar with the matter, that Sify would invest ₹15,266 crore in a 500 MW data centre there and lease all of it to Meta, and that Meta would land its Waterworth subsea cable at Sify's station. Neither company replied to ET. The state has since approved 25 more acres for Sify's second phase at ₹50 lakh an acre. Roughly half of that land will be handed over only after pending court cases on it are resolved.

The second reason is cost. The same KPMG report puts the cost of building a data centre in Vizag at USD 6.5 per watt. Singapore is 14.5 and Tokyo 15.2. Of the ten cities in KPMG's chart, only Shanghai comes in lower.

The state wants much more than one campus. IT minister Nara Lokesh told the Assembly on 19 August 2026 that Andhra Pradesh had met its target of 6.5 GW of data centre capacity in Visakhapatnam.

Three sites, one hill, one temple

Now inland. The state's land orders, filed with the National Green Tribunal, allot 601.4 acres to three special-purpose companies wholly owned by Adani Infra (India): 266.6 acres at Tarluvada, 160 acres at Adavivaram and Mudasarlova, and 174.8 acres at Rambilli in Anakapalli district. Google's own subsidiary in the project is Raiden Infotech. The first order, in October 2025, had allotted 480 acres.

Publicly, the hub is "1 GW". The Guardian reported in September that state environmental clearances permit 2.51 GW. Asked about it, Google described a "gigawatt scale AI hub" that was "comparable to other projects".

Adavivaram's 160 acres belong to a temple. In the High Court, the state's industrial corporation APIIC says ownership stays with the Endowments Department, that the land is leased, and that an annual rent of ₹26,45,54,400 has been paid to the Sri Varaha Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy Devasthanam. The temple's executive officer told the same court that the land is the deity's "absolute and inalienable property".

The environmental clearance for this site, dated 10 June 2026, classifies it as Category B2, building and construction. That category is cleared by a state authority, not by the Centre. A petitioner before the NGT argues that the site is about 750 metres from the Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary and uphill from the Mudasarlova Reservoir, a drinking-water source for the city, so the Centre should have assessed it. The state's Advocate-General maintains it is a Category B project within state jurisdiction. According to submissions in court reported by Mint, work there is at the stage of demolition, levelling, tree cutting and a boundary wall.

The fields: who held the land

Back to Tarluvada, and to the numbers that do not agree with each other.

According to Frontline, the local tahsildar put the land's market value at ₹20 lakh an acre. He said holders of D-patta land, the plots assigned to the landless, were being offered two and a half times that, ₹50 lakh, and occupants without papers ₹10 lakh. A young villager told the magazine that the market value runs from about ₹1.5 crore near the village to nearly ₹5 crore by National Highway 16.

The Guardian reports that 520 families recently had land taken back that the government had allocated to them about 20 years earlier. It also reports that 47 Dalit farmers were compensated. One of them said he received USD 40,000 for his only acre, and that the replacement plot and one job per family he was promised had not arrived. In June, farmers protesting at the Collectorate told The Hindu that 520 farmers were affected and that claims from 52 assigned-land holders were still unresolved, partly because of errors in survey records.

The state government told the Guardian that no land was taken by force and that eligible holders received "generous compensation". The Adani Group said all necessary legal approvals were in place.

The Human Rights Forum, a civil liberties group in Andhra Pradesh, set out its objection within four days of the announcement:

The case for building here

The state's argument is not hidden, and it deserves to be heard in full. In the Assembly, Lokesh said the data centres' water, about 3 tmc a year at 6.5 GW, would come from Polavaram through dedicated pipelines. "Water required for the facilities will be met from the allocation earmarked for the industries," he said. He added that at least 70% of their power would come from green sources, and, as PTI reported, called the criticism "deliberate misinformation". In the High Court, APIIC argued that a project of this size, facing competition from other states, needed incentives, and that public land need not always be auctioned.

Google told the Guardian that the campuses will be air-cooled and will not affect local drinking water. Alexander Smith, who leads Google's technical infrastructure communications for Asia-Pacific, wrote to the Christian Science Monitor:

"Google's AI Hub investment is a multi-decade commitment to Visakhapatnam and to India – and a commitment measured in decades carries an obligation to be a good neighbour."

The bill has a ceiling, set by the state itself. Government Order Ms No. 40 of the IT, Electronics and Communications department, issued on 11 October 2025, approved incentives for Raiden Infotech "with an overall cap of ₹22,002 crore", as quoted by PTI. The Hindu itemised it: a 25% land discount, a capital subsidy, SGST reimbursements, a ₹1-a-unit power subsidy for 15 years and a 25% water tariff subsidy for 10. That is a maximum, not money already spent. The MoU behind it is unpublished; the Human Rights Forum says a Right to Information request for it was rejected citing confidentiality. How many permanent jobs a campus like this creates is argued in thirty jobs per hundred megawatts. The Union government's own offer is read line by line in the 2047 tax holiday.

Indianapolis, Lowell, Tarluvada

The comparison everyone reaches for is American. On 22 September 2025, Google's attorney told the Indianapolis City-County Council that it was withdrawing a rezoning petition for a USD 1 billion campus on 469 acres of Franklin Township farmland. Seventeen councillors had publicly opposed it. In January 2026, Microsoft wrote in a letter published by Lowell Charter Township, Michigan: "We asked the seller to pause the rezone process so that we could spend time with the community early this year."

Read the details before drawing the moral. In Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Business Journal reported, Google did not own the land. It was under contract, pending a rezoning vote. In both American cases, the private land and the zoning hearing gave neighbours a room they could fill before anything was built.

In Tarluvada, the disputed plots were assigned by the state, taken back by the state and allotted by the state. The Adavivaram clearance came from a state authority under a category that, as Mint explains, typically requires no detailed environmental impact assessment. The Guardian reports that the clearances came in nine days, with no public consultation. The neighbours' room is a court, and the courts have not stopped the work. On 6 October the High Court let construction continue "at its own risk and cost", ruling that money spent now would create no rights for the developer if the petition succeeds.

What we don't know

• The terms. The state's order caps incentives at ₹22,002 crore, but the MoU is unpublished, so how much will actually be drawn, and on what conditions, is not public.
• The payments. Per-acre compensation appears as ₹17 lakh, ₹20 lakh and ₹50 lakh in different accounts, and the number of affected holders as roughly 50, 47, 52 and 520, depending on who is counted. We have not seen the revenue records or award documents that would settle this.
• The size. The announced 1 GW and the reported 2.51 GW clearance have not been reconciled in public.
• The water. Google promises air cooling. As the Monitor notes, it has published no consumption figure for this site.
• Meta's role. The Paradesipalem tenancy rests on single-source reporting that neither company has confirmed.

The horizon line

Look east from the hill again. The NGT has sought the Centre's response and listed the appeal for 26 October. The High Court writ continues. On 14 October, the MoU's first anniversary, about 200 people marched through the rain in Visakhapatnam. The group behind it, Green Visakha, says it will ask mayoral and corporator candidates in the coming local body elections where they stand. Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has asked the builders to be ready for inauguration by September 2028.

The hill that once told fishermen how far they were from home now marks something else: the place where India's AI build-out stopped being a forecast and became a fenced field.