MUMBAI: Google’s latest India play isn’t just about smarter AI, it’s about making the country the engine room of its next growth story. From enterprise infrastructure and healthcare to education and cybersecurity, the tech giant has unveiled a sweeping AI expansion strategy while revealing the scale of its contribution to India’s digital economy.
At Google I/O Connect India 2026, the company announced a series of initiatives aimed at accelerating artificial intelligence adoption across enterprises, developers, schools and public institutions. It also revealed that the Android and Google Play ecosystem generated an estimated Rs 5.3 lakh crore in revenue for app publishers and the wider digital economy in 2025, a 28 per cent increase over the previous year.
The announcements come as global technology companies race to establish India as a strategic AI hub, driven by rising enterprise demand, a thriving developer ecosystem and the government’s growing emphasis on sovereign AI infrastructure.
One of Google’s biggest announcements was the expansion of Google Distributed Cloud, enabling enterprises—including organisations in regulated industries and the public sector—to deploy Gemini AI models within domestic data centres. The setup allows AI workloads to run without connecting to the public internet, addressing data localisation and regulatory compliance requirements.
Google also confirmed that Gemini 3.5 Flash will now be available with in-country machine learning processing commitments, giving Indian businesses and startups greater flexibility to build AI applications while keeping data within the country.
Education formed another major pillar of Google’s announcements. Google DeepMind introduced AI Research Foundations, a free 56-hour curriculum designed to help developers build and fine-tune large language models. The programme will be delivered in partnership with Nasscom and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
The company also launched ATL Saathi, a Gemini-powered assistant for teachers in Atal Tinkering Labs, with an initial rollout across 100 schools before a broader expansion.
In healthcare, researchers at AIIMS Delhi will leverage Google’s MedGemma multimodal AI models to develop India-specific solutions focused on leprosy and sexual and reproductive health. Google said the resulting AI models would eventually be made available to developers across the country.
To improve accessibility, Gemini Live has expanded support to more than 25 Indian languages and dialects, including Sanskrit, Bhojpuri and Maithili, reflecting Google’s continued investment in multilingual AI experiences for Indian users.
Cybersecurity also featured prominently in the announcements. Google said its AI-powered security agent Sec-Gemini V3 will be made available to selected government agencies and enterprise testers in India. Alongside this, the company unveiled CAPSEM, an open-source secure runtime environment for AI agents, as well as new industry standards aimed at strengthening AI-powered digital payments and secure online sessions.
Google also highlighted the growing commercial impact of AI within its developer ecosystem. According to third-party research cited by the company, 91 per cent of surveyed Google Play developers using Google’s AI tools reported revenue benefits, while 76 per cent of adults expressed interest in creating applications using natural language prompts.
The broad range of announcements underscores Google’s ambition to deepen its footprint across India’s AI value chain from cloud infrastructure and foundational models to education, healthcare and cybersecurity as competition intensifies among global technology companies seeking to power the country’s next phase of AI-led growth.