Google’s $15 billion AI hub: Vizag trades 400 acres of green land for data centre

About 600 acres, in three places

Visakhapatnam · data-centre sites · land allotted

India’s EIA Notification of 2006 requires that clearance before “any construction work, or preparation of land by the project management except for securing the land”. In all three files, the state’s expert committee noted that it appraised the application “from the Environmental point of view only with respect to liquid, solid and air pollution management”.

What happened next was different at each site.

Tarluvada is a village about 20 km north of the city, where farmland meets a tree-covered hill. At 267 acres, it is the largest of the three sites. Its developer, Vizag Mega Data Center Park Ltd, applied for an environmental clearance on 9 April 2026 and received it nine days later, on 18 April.

Clearing had begun in late March. By 16 April, two days before the clearance, about 130 acres inside the boundaries the company filed were bare.

About 130 acres were bare two days before the clearance

Tarluvada · Sentinel-2 satellite images, 10 m · December 2025 to October 2026

Single trees are too small to see. Other definitions of “bare” give 75–154 acres on 16 April.

The paperwork describes the same land in two ways. The expert committee’s minutes note that on PARIVESH, the government’s clearance portal, “approximately 90% of the proposed site falls within the Pedda Chukka Konda Reserve Forest”. The same minutes add that the Survey of India map shows no forest on the land. A day before the application, the Divisional Forest Officer issued a no-objection certificate for 266.60 acres.

The clearance itself covers a first phase of 120 acres. By 13 October, 221 acres had been cleared inside the boundaries the company filed: about 98 within that first phase, and the rest within the whole-site boundary from its March application.

The rules allow “securing the land” before a clearance, but not “preparation of land”. Whether the clearing before 18 April was one or the other is a question for the state’s environmental authority, SEIAA, not for a satellite.

At the city’s edge, the order was reversed.

Adavivaram sits on the city’s northern edge, about 6 km from the centre, on a hill slope beside Mudasarlova reservoir, a source of drinking water for the city. The boundary its developer, Vizag Hyperscale Data Center Park Ltd, filed comes within about 100 metres of the water. In 2021, satellites mapped 96% of the land since cleared as tree cover.

When the clearance arrived on 10 June 2026, about 8 acres were bare. Most of the clearing came later, between August and late September.

About 88 acres of a tree-covered slope have been cleared

Adavivaram · Sentinel-2 images on 3D terrain, seen from across Mudasarlova reservoir · December 2025 to October 2026

Height is exaggerated 1.5 times. Another 38 cleared acres lie just outside the filed boundary.

On paper, this land is not forest. The Divisional Forest Officer’s no-objection certificate of 8 May says the site is “falling outside the forest area”, 750 metres from Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary and 470 metres from its eco-sensitive zone.

Both can be true: “forest” is a legal category, not a description of what grows on the land.

The clearance asks the company to “prepare a tree enumeration plan and develop compensatory greenbelt in 1:2 ratio”, to record the new planting with geo-tagged coordinates, and to make sure the project does not harm the reservoir or the sanctuary.

The project is being challenged in the Andhra Pradesh High Court. A public interest petition by environmental activist Bolisetty Satyanarayana argues that the 160 acres belong to the Simhachalam temple, that the site is too close to the sanctuary and the reservoir, and that permissions for forest land and tree felling were not obtained.

SEIAA has told the court the site is outside forest land, and that data centres are assessed as building projects, which do not need a public hearing. APIIC has told it that the 160 acres were leased, with ownership remaining with the Endowments Department; the petitioner says no lease deed was registered. In October, the court allowed work to continue, subject to its final order and to compliance with all applicable norms.

At the third site, the land had been approved for industry two years earlier.

Rambilli is on the coast about 45 km south-west of the city. The data-centre site sits almost entirely inside a 2,436-acre industrial park developed by APIIC, which received its own environmental clearance from the Union environment ministry in July 2024.

That clearance describes the park’s land as 58.6% agricultural plantation and 29% cropland, with cashew, casuarina, eucalyptus and mango among the main trees. It also plans to plant about 4.5 lakh trees across the park.

About 91 acres cleared inside the data-centre boundary

Rambilli · Sentinel-2 satellite images, 10 m · December 2025 to October 2026

Bare plots outside the solid line belong to the wider park and are not counted. A random-point check suggests about 110 acres, so this count is probably low.

Most of the clearing inside the data-centre boundary began around 11 April 2026, a week before its own clearance on 18 April. About 60 acres were bare by the end of April, and about 91 by mid-October.

From space, an orchard and a forest both read as tree cover. This story counts both, but names the difference.

Another 96 acres of clearing extends just beyond the filed boundaries, at Tarluvada and Adavivaram. Maps of the full allotments are not public, so some of that may be allotted land too.

The largest promises belong to the hub as a whole, and no source we found splits them by site. Google has announced $15 billion over 2026–2030, its largest investment in India, including a new international subsea gateway at Vizag. Modelling by Access Partnership and Google, as reported, projects about 1.88 lakh direct and indirect jobs a year in 2028–2032.

The public side of the ledger has its own estimate: the Guardian puts the state’s tax breaks and cheaper land, power and water at about ₹22,000 crore over 20 years.

Some lines are still blank. None of the three sites has published how many trees were felled, and maps of the full allotments are not public. At Tarluvada, whether the clearing before 18 April counts as “securing the land” is for SEIAA to answer. At Adavivaram, where the 1:2 compensatory greenbelt will be has not been published, and the High Court has yet to decide the petition. Who owns the three developer companies is not public either, and reports differ.