29.4.22

Google’s largest campus after US gets off the ground in Hyderabad

Tech giant Google’s largest campus outside the US, slated to come up in Hyderabad, is getting bigger.

The project, which was first announced in 2015, finally got off the ground on Thursday, with the internet major breaking ground for the project that was originally planned at an investment of ₹1,000 crore. What’s more, the campus, which will be coming up on a 7.3-acre parcel of land at Gachibowli with a built-up area of 3.3 million sq ft, will be larger than neighbour Amazon’s 3 million sq ft campus that is the Jeff Bezos-run ecommerce giant’s largest owned building globally with a capacity to house 15,000 people.

The Google-owned campus will more than double Google’s footprint in Hyderabad to over 6 million sq ft, Sanjay Gupta, country head & vice president, Google India said on Thursday.

Currently, the Mountain View, California, headquartered player has 10 offices in and around Hyderabad’s HiTec City area with a total footprint of around 3 million sq ft, he added.

While Google officials were tight-lipped over the company’s total headcount in Hyderabad and the expected seating capacity of the upcoming campus, all Gupta said was it would be the company’s largest campus outside the US and would house thousands of employees.

“Hyderabad has been home to one of our largest employee bases since we started our operations in India in 2005,” Gupta said.

However, sources said it could be big enough to accommodate about 30,000-35,000 people and was expected to be ready in about 2-3 years time.

In 2015, Google had announced that it would be setting up a 2 million sq ft facility, its largest outside the US, in Hyderabad at an invesment around ₹1,000 crore with a capacity to house about 13,000 employees by 2019.

But Google was able to acquire the 7.3-acre Gachibowli site only in 2019.

On the occasion, Google also inked a memorandum of understanding with the Telangana government to collaborate on bringing the benefits of the digital economy to youth and women entrepreneurs. 

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