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Sundar Pichai Defends AI Spending Amid Bubble Fears

Sundar Pichai announced a $15 billion AI hub in Vizag and a subsea cable initiative to boost AI connectivity between India, the US, and the Southern Hemisphere.

  • On Feb 18, 2026, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said AI was the biggest platform shift in our lifetime and defended Google’s decade-long investment in AI at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi.
  • Market investors note that hyperscaler firms are pouring money into AI with little near-term return, amplifying pressure on capital expenditure projections.
  • Infrastructure and skilling commitments include an AI hub in Vizag with gigawatt-scale compute and the India-America Connect initiative, plus Google AI Professional Certificate and GenAI assistants for over 10,000 schools and 11 million students.
  • He said India can leapfrog by radically transforming sectors and workflows, citing early healthcare pilots with AIIMS as an example of AI’s impact.
  • Longer-Term, commentators argue that capital expenditure projections from Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft are reasonable as cloud computing drives long‑term returns and Google Cloud posted 48% growth in Q4.
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Google announced Wednesday the construction of new submarine cables from India to enhance the capacity of the planet's most populous country in artificial intelligence, during the global AI summit in New Delhi. The U.S. giant said that "three submarine connections will unite India with Singapore, South Africa and Australia." It will also create four fiber optics to reinforce "the existing connections between the U.S., India and other regions of …

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Times of India broke the news in India on Wednesday, February 18, 2026.
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