At Davos, Lokesh pitches investments in clean energy, technology

Vijayawada: IT and education minister Nara Lokesh held a series of meetings with global business leaders on the second day of World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos (Switzerland) on Wednesday, pitching investments in clean energy, advanced manufacturing, technology services, and food processing across Andhra Pradesh.Lokesh met Meta vice-president and global policy head Kelvin Martin, and requested the company support in development of scalable data centre capacity in Visakhapatnam, aligned with Meta's global infrastructure requirements and the state's digital ecosystem. He proposed a centre of excellence for Reality Labs, in partnership with Ratan Tata Innovation Hub (RTIH), to mentor startups working in immersive technologies, AI, and next-generation digital products. Lokesh further sought expansion of WhatsApp-based digital governance use cases, including grievance redressal and official state communications. Martin said Meta would discuss the proposals internally.Lokesh also met Zerodha founder Nikhil Kamath and invited the company to establish a technology development centre in Visakhapatnam, focusing on platform engineering, back-end systems, trading algorithms, data analytics, and fintech research and development. He also proposed that Zerodha partner with RTIH as a lead mentor to support fintech startups and strengthen the state's entrepreneurship ecosystem. He further sought collaboration with Zerodha to design and roll out a statewide financial literacy programme from school to college level.In another meeting, Lokesh held discussions with Scale AI global managing director Trevor Thompson and invited the US-based firm to set up a centre of excellence in Visakhapatnam. He proposed collaboration to establish an AI safety, evaluation, and governance lab under the RTIH framework, and sought support for large language model benchmarking, red-teaming, and AI governance for public datasets and govt AI applications using Scale AI's Seal platform.