Google announces $8 million funding for India’s AI Centers of Excellence

Google has announced a substantial financial commitment and a suite of new collaborations aimed at strengthening India’s artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem, headlined by an $8 million funding package for four AI Centers of Excellence established by the Indian government. The announcement, made at the company’s "Lab to Impact" dialogue on Tuesday (December 16), is supported by the India AI Impact Summit 2026. The initiative aligns with the national vision to "Make AI in India and Make AI work for India."

“AI is humanity’s most profound and powerful force for progress... India’s unique embrace of AI’s potential is equipping the country to lead a global AI-powered future,” said Dr. Manish Gupta, Senior Research Director at Google DeepMind.

Google announces commitment in healthcare and agriculture

The $8 million grant from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, will support research at four institutions: TANUH (IISc Bangalore) for developing scalable AI solutions for effective treatment of non-communicable diseases; Airawat Research Foundation (IIT Kanpur) for research on AI to transform urban governance; AI Centre of Excellence for Education (IIT Madras) for creating solutions to enhance learning and teaching outcomes and ANNAM.AI (IIT Ropar) that focuses on data-driven solutions for agriculture and farmer welfare.




Google has also announced collaborations aimed at integrating AI into India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), particularly in healthcare. The first is for Health Foundation Models, a $400,000 grant to support the use of MedGemma to build India’s Health Foundation Models.

Google is working with the National Health Authority (NHA) to deploy advanced AI to convert millions of fragmented, unstructured medical records into the international, machine-readable FHIR standard. Thirdly, Google is helping the NHA bring over 400,000 registered health facilities onto Google Maps and Search, ensuring the public can easily find official, updated health centre information.

Google’s $2 million fund for Indic Language Technologies Research Hub

To ensure AI advancements serve India’s vast linguistic diversity, Google announced a $2 million founding contribution to establish the new Indic Language Technologies Research Hub at IIT Bombay. Moreover, all 22 Gemma models, Google’s foundational open models, have been uploaded to AIKosh, the India AI Mission’s open data and model platform. Indian startups that leverage Gemma for Indic language solutions are receiving $50,000 in funding.

There are separate grants as well: A $2.5 million grant supports Wadhwani AI in piloting this LLM-based conversational AI assistant and a separate $2 million grant to Wadhwani AI will develop this new Indian language model for agriculture.