Google Is Building Its Largest Indian Data Centre on Land That Was Once Redistributed to the Poor

In October 2025, Adani Enterprises announced a joint venture with Google’s Indian subsidiary Raiden to build what it described as India’s largest artificial intelligence data centre campus — a $15 billion, one-gigawatt project on the outskirts of Visakhapatnam, on India’s east coast. The Andhra Pradesh government allocated 480 acres across three locations to enable it: 200 acres at Tarluvada village in Anandapuram Mandal, 120 acres at Adavivaram-Mudasarlova in Visakhapatnam district, and 160 acres at Rambilli in Anakapalli district. Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu laid the foundation stone on 28 April 2026. The state’s Environment Impact Assessment Authority had issued the project’s environmental clearance ten days earlier.

The land at Tarluvada has a history. In the 1970s, the Andhra Pradesh state government identified the village among others in the region as a site for land redistribution — allotting roughly two acres each to landless rural households through a special programme intended to provide subsistence agriculture to families that had none. The redistribution was one of the more substantive pieces of post-Independence land reform in the southern states, and the two-acre plots became, for the households that received them, the principal source of food and livelihood for the next two generations.

The 200 acres earmarked for Google’s primary data centre site are, in significant part, those same plots.

Tarluvada is a village of about three thousand people, located thirty-five kilometres from Visakhapatnam and roughly one kilometre off the national highway. It has no bank branch and no ATM. Its residents are mostly farm labourers. The land surrounding the village is planted with marigolds, jasmine, roses, paddy, mango orchards, cashew, and teak. Before the data centre announcement, Tarluvada was not on the map of most APAC investors. Google Maps has since renamed it “Tarluvada IT Hub and Data Center Hub.”

Pyla Kondamma is a farmer in Tarluvada and a former head of its village council. She told the journalists of the Environmental Reporting Collective, whose Indian reporting was led by Shamsheer Yousaf and Monica Jha, that she will not sell. “We are not afraid,” she said. “Even if they kill us, we will not give it away.”

Parupalli Appayamma and Pyla Simhachalam, two other residents whose families have farmed in Tarluvada for generations, told The Times of India that compensation could not substitute for what was being asked of them. “The government may offer compensation,” they said, “but money cannot replace the attachment and the intrinsic value we have for our land.”

The compensation has improved over the announcement period. The Andhra Pradesh government’s initial rate of Rs 17 lakh per acre was raised to Rs 20 lakh per acre after farmer requests. The final figure, applying a statutory multiplier of two and a half times, came to Rs 50 lakh per acre — approximately fifty-eight thousand US dollars for the two-acre plot a 1970s-era household had been granted. Some residents have accepted. Bali Venkat Raju, a Tarluvada landholder who voluntarily surrendered his plot for the project, told The Hans India that adverse environmental impact was possible but that a Google investment of this scale would change lives.

The village is divided. The Pyla family and several others have refused. Before Google, Tarluvada had been considered for a battery manufacturing facility and a quarrying operation. Both were rejected by villagers. The acceptance rate this time is higher. The pressure, by all accounts of the residents who have spoken to journalists, has also been higher.

The Tarluvada site, in Anandapuram Mandal, sits within Pedda Chukka Konda Reserve Forest. By the Human Rights Forum’s account, ninety per cent of the project’s land falls inside the notified reserve. The state environmental authority’s clearance noted that the Survey of India toposheet “does not show any forest” on that land. Local forest officers were nonetheless asked to issue a no-objection certificate. India’s Supreme Court has, in successive rulings under the T.N. Godavarman case, mandated prior clearance for any non-forest activity on forest land. A reserve forest classified out of existence by reference to a toposheet would, on the face of it, conflict with that line of jurisprudence.

The Adavivaram-Mudasarlova site sits approximately one hundred and twenty metres from the Mudasarlova reservoir, a primary drinking water source for the city of Visakhapatnam, and adjoins the notified eco-sensitive zone of Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary. The Rambilli site requires clearance from both the sanctuary and from Project Varsha, the Indian Navy’s nuclear submarine base, which adjoins it.

On 18 May, an HRF team visited the Kailasgiri forest area in the Simhachalam hill range and documented site preparation, tree felling, and the laying of construction roads. Under Indian environmental law, no project proponent may undertake site activities before securing environmental clearance for that location.

Four days later, the censorship began. On 22 May, Instagram restricted a two-minute reel produced by the Environmental Reporting Collective’s “Dirty Data” investigation — the same reporting that documented the community profile above. The reel had received approximately 2.6 million views in the four days since publication. Instagram’s notification cited a Government of India notice under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, without further legal basis. On 31 May, Instagram restricted two further posts by the Human Rights Forum critical of the project. The Guntur Urban police separately approached X Corp asking it to remove an HRF post containing video of alleged environmental violations at the site. Within a week, at least twenty short videos from eleven different accounts critical of the project had been restricted on Instagram in India.

Andhra Pradesh has committed subsidies on land, water, electricity, and tax holidays extending to 2047 for the project. Site preparation continues.

What is happening in Vizag has happened before, in different forms, with different companies, in two other APAC markets. The Vizag case is not the discovery of a pattern. It is the latest expression of one.

In July 2024, representatives of Microsoft informed the Telangana government that the company was facing “some problems with the local panchayat” at its data centre site in Mekaguda village, on the outskirts of Hyderabad. The state’s IT minister tasked the local administrator with resolving the matter “by evening” and urged Microsoft to complete construction by 2025. The panchayat is the village’s elected self-governance body. The local administrator does not have authority over it. The instruction was to clear an obstacle, not to engage a process.

The community Microsoft was instructed to be cleared past had already used the formal channels available to it. Residents filed complaints with the Revenue Department, the Irrigation Department, and the Telangana State Industrial Infrastructure Corporation beginning in mid-2022. Each upheld the acquisition as serving public use. In July 2023, more than fifty residents filed a writ petition in the Telangana High Court against Microsoft and thirty-five other companies and government bodies, alleging that the data centre had been built beyond its property boundary, that industrial waste was being dumped into the adjacent Tungakunta lake, and that groundwater across five surrounding villages had been contaminated — affecting an estimated twenty thousand people. In May 2024, a judge rejected an interim application from the petitioners asking the court to direct Microsoft to halt the alleged activities. The judge called the request “vague.” Hearings on the main petition have continued. No verdict has been issued as of the most recent confirmed update. Microsoft’s planning documents anticipated operational status by 2025. The case proceeds around an operating facility. Microsoft has denied the allegations and stated it has complied with all relevant local regulations.

In Johor, Malaysia, on 7 February 2026, residents of the Taman Nusa Bayu estate and adjacent neighbourhoods staged a public protest outside the construction site of a 43.5-hectare data centre development by Beijing-based ZData and Japan’s NTT Data Group. The Diplomat described it as Malaysia’s first-ever public protest against the data centre industry. Construction had begun in early 2025 and included the levelling of a hill that residents had previously valued. Dust drifting into homes, cracks appearing in walls from piling vibrations, and wildlife displaced from cleared forest into residential areas had accumulated over the preceding year. A separate development by Singapore-based Racks Central, on land adjacent to Kampung Cahaya Baru in Pasir Gudang, was producing similar complaints. Amnah Jemat, sixty-four, told The Straits Times that residents had been told the land was being cleared for a shopping centre and only learned afterwards it was a data centre.

On 11 March 2026, the state assemblyman for Kota Iskandar, Pandak Ahmad, held a press conference and conceded that the state government had failed.

The “lesson,” as he called it, has not yet produced a new consultation framework. Approvals already granted continue to construction.

The pattern across these three cases is not that the frameworks failed. The frameworks exist. Environmental clearance was required. Court petitions were admitted. Stop-work orders were issued. State legislators responded. The structural feature is more specific than failure.

The framework’s design assumption is that community objections register through formal mechanisms operating on a multi-year clock. The project’s design assumption is that construction completes in eighteen to twenty-four months. When the two timelines disagree, the project’s timeline is the binding one. The framework is producing the outcome it was designed to produce. The community channel functions. The project proceeds. There is no contradiction, because the two systems were never built to constrain each other.

The numbers describe what this looks like at each site. In Vizag, ten days separated the environmental clearance from the foundation stone ceremony. In Mekaguda, the petition has been pending in the Telangana High Court for thirty-five months. The data centre is operational. In Johor, ZData began clearing land within ten months of acquiring the plot. The community protest came eleven months into construction. The state legislator’s admission of error came five weeks after the protest. The consultation framework his admission implied was needed has not yet been published.

The Vizag case is not even isolated within India. In June 2024, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation demolished Jai Bhim Nagar, a settlement of approximately six hundred and fifty households that had stood for more than three decades inside Powai’s Hiranandani Gardens — a township whose developer, the Hiranandani Group, operates one of India’s largest data centre platforms through its Yotta Data Services subsidiary and has expansion plans inside the same township. Residents were beaten and arrested during the demolition. A subsequent investigation ordered by the Bombay High Court found the demolition exceeded the state human rights commission’s authority and violated monsoon-season eviction rules. Charges have been filed against BMC officials and Hiranandani associates. The 28 residents who petitioned the court are still living, more than two years later, on the surrounding pavements. That is a separate piece, not this one. But it is the same pattern.

In each case, the community engaged the channel the framework offered. In each case, the project completed or substantially advanced before the channel produced a result. This is not a bug.

The reform that would address this pattern is not a stronger regulator or a faster court. It is a binding pause on construction once a community petition is admitted — a statutory stay, not an interim application that can be called “vague” by a judge applying his discretion. That mechanism does not exist in any major APAC data centre jurisdiction.

China’s framework requires mandatory review at multiple construction phases, with the authority to halt work between them. The EU’s recast Energy Efficiency Directive requires environmental impact reporting to be complete before site activity begins, with penalties for non-submission. APAC’s hyperscale buildout is happening in markets where neither rule applies, in the absence of either practice.

Whether the projects in Vizag, Mekaguda, and Iskandar Puteri should ultimately have been built is not a question this editorial can resolve. Whether the communities living next to them had any meaningful capacity to affect that decision before construction began is. The answer the documentation supports, across all three cases, is that they did not.

Andhra Pradesh’s Chief Minister laid the foundation stone in Vizag ten days after the clearance was issued. Telangana’s IT minister asked an administrator to resolve community objections by evening. Johor’s assemblyman called it a lesson. Pyla Kondamma is still on her land in Tarluvada and says she will not leave. The communities are not in a position to choose what comes next. The governments are. So far, what has come next is more announcements.