Google Visakhapatnam data center, Visakhapatnam district, Andhra Pradesh

In Tarluvada, a village outside Visakhapatnam in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, Google is building what it calls India's first gigawatt-scale AI hub through its subsidiary Raiden Infotech India, three data center campuses on more than 600 acres in the Visakhapatnam and Anakapalli districts, part of a $15 billion investment in India from 2026 to 2030. Raiden has announced partnerships with Adani Infrastructure and Airtel's Nxtra to build the hub, which displaced 51 households, most of them Dalit farming families who had worked the land for more than 50 years. "We were never told about any data centre," one resident said, according to Land Conflict Watch.

Farmer Relli Ramakrishnan told Land Conflict Watch his family had cleared the land themselves: "We had to clear the jungle ourselves; it took us 15 years, 15 long years. We worked hard, shed our blood for this land." After the pushback, the state raised compensation to 20 lakh rupees an acre for recorded land and 10 lakh rupees an acre for unrecorded land, up from initial offers of 17 lakh and 8.5 lakh, and added house-site land and job or shop promises for 520 farmers.

The project's environmental clearance was granted on April 18, 2026, nine days after Adani's subsidiary applied for it and ten days before an April 28 groundbreaking attended by Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, The News Minute reported. The clearance was classified in a lower-scrutiny category that let it skip a public hearing and full environmental review, even though the site is 1.53 kilometers from the Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary and nearly 90 percent of the Tarluvada parcel overlaps a reserve forest, the outlet reported.

The Human Rights Forum said putting "a high-energy, heat-intensive complex of this magnitude in such a terrain is ecologically reckless" given the city's water stress and cyclone exposure, and called Google's promise of 100 percent renewable operation technically untenable. Visakhapatnam receives 410 million liters of water a day against a requirement of 480 million, the state government says, and residents and children have marched with banners reading "We cannot drink DATA."

The dispute is before the Andhra Pradesh High Court and the National Green Tribunal. On August 24, 2026, a High Court bench led by Chief Justice Lisa Gill refused to halt construction but ordered the state to ensure all legal and environmental permissions are in place and to file a consolidated response from the departments that granted approvals. Petitioner Bolisetty Satyanarayana also challenges the use of about 160 acres of Simhachalam temple land and argues the environmental clearance covers building the data center, not operating it.