In a major step towards strengthening India’s AI ecosystem, Google Cloud announced a significant expansion of its local infrastructure and a partnership with IIT Madras’ AI4Bharat research centre to launch “Indic Arena” - a public benchmarking platform for AI models focused on Indian languages and cultural contexts. 

The initiative sees Google Cloud providing cloud credits and access to advanced compute powered by its AI Hypercomputer architecture with the latest Trillium TPUs, enabling Indian organisations to train and deploy advanced models such as Gemini with full data-residency support. 
Indic Arena, run by AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, is designed as a community-driven, anonymous leaderboard where AI models can be evaluated on multilingual and culturally grounded tasks - acknowledging that performance in English alone isn’t enough for India’s diversity. 
By aligning infrastructure investment and benchmark development, the partnership aims to support startups, researchers and enterprises in building AI that truly understands Indian contexts - from vernacular languages to region‐specific logic and usage. 

With these moves, India’s path toward sovereign, inclusive and India-centric artificial intelligence solutions appears to be gaining real momentum.