Unleashing India’s AI ambition: Google brings its Frontier AI to Indian developers, propelling their Global Leadership and Unprecedented Local Innovation
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Brings on-shore processing for Gemini 2.5 Flash to India,
strengthening speed and responsiveness of its high-performing thinking generative model Highlights Play and Android ecosystem’s INR 4 lakh crore revenue
contribution to India’s app publishers and the country’s digital economy in 2024 |
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Announces new accelerator with
Unity to help Indian developers build world-class games Launches new Optimized AI templates and agentic tools in Firebase Studio for faster app development and vibe coding |
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Collaborating with 3 India AI Mission
startups building next-generation Make-In-India AI models based on Gemma |
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Bengaluru,
23 July 2025: At Google I/O Connect India 2025 held in
Bengaluru earlier today, Google announced new initiatives
and AI capabilities to support
the Indian developer and startup ecosystem in leading India’s AI-powered ambition. Google’s announcements emphasized the company’s lasting commitment to Indian
developers’ success, and include localizing data processing of its high-performance thinking model Gemini
2.5 Flash, new Agentic AI tools in Firebase Studio, a new training program with
one of the world’s leading
gaming engine plat orm – Unity, and collaborations with 3 India
AI Mission startups in building innovative solutions toward the development of India’s Make-in-India
AI models. |
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The company
also highlighted that, based
on third-party evaluations, the Google
Play and Android
ecosystem generated INR 4 lakh crore in
revenue for app publishers and the wider economy
in India in 2024, and supported the creation of 35 lakh direct, indirect, and spillover jobs in India.1 |
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Dr. Manish Gupta, Senior
Director for India and APAC at Google
DeepMind, who opened the
event, said, “Indian developers are literally writing the next
chapter of India’s success story, using
AI capabilities to build
real-world applications that are reaching
millions of businesses and people across
India and the world. We have been
inspired by their solutions, and proud that many have chosen
our AI, including Gemini, Gemma and GenMedia models
like Veo and Imagen, to build
their innovations. As we have
done today, we remain steadfast in bringing them our industry-leading, cut ing-edge capabilities to accelerate their
journeys, and India’s leadership in a global
AI-led future.” |
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Preeti Lobana, Country
Manager, Google
India who held a ?reside
chat with Subrata
Mitra, Partner, Accel on building enduring AI-driven companies during the event’s
opening keynote
stated: “There's a buzz about
the 'India Opportunity' driven by an ambitious national vision. Google is deeply commit
ed to leveraging this
unique foundation. India’s developers are shaping how the world will use AI, and we're
proud to stand with them. We're giving India
the best tools, the most open
plat orms, and the
strongest support to build
boldly for the world, fostering a profound 'AI Productivity Leap' across
businesses and startups.” |
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Bringing Cut ing-edge
AI to power Indian Innovation |
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The availability of Gemini 2.5 Flash processing in India is a signi?cant step by the company
to further enable Indian developers with powerful, localized AI capabilities. This is aimed
at enabling top-tier stability and speed
for developers, especially
in building for regulated industries like healthcare, banking and ?nance,
and for the public sector, where data residency and low-latency processing are crucial. |
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1 Public First. ‘Google Play & Android 2024
impact and contributions for India. |
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The company’s Gemma models
are also contributing to India’s AI ambition. Sarvam, Soket AI and Gnani,
which have been selected by the India AI Mission, are building
the next generation of Make in India AI models based on Gemma. Google has been closely collaborating with
Sarvam, which built the recently-released Sarvam-Translate model for long-form text translation using Gemma. |
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Google is also closely
partnering with BharatGen at IIT Bombay to build indigenous Indic
language Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models that will aim
to
make Gemma more helpful in the Indic context, especially for historically underrepresented languages
and governance applications. |
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Google announced
measures that will
be especially helpful for developers building for India’s booming mobile commerce sector. It is
expanding the availability of fresh
and accurate information in Google Maps comprising over 250 million places worldwide, enabling developers to build
bet er generative AI features. New India-speci?c pricing for the Google Maps
Places UI Kit will help
developers build
easy-to-use widgets and components with the best
of Google Maps
Places for a fraction of the
cost, while expansion of AI-powered summaries in the Places API to India
will enable developers to create highly informative and engaging location-based services that save users time and resonate with local
needs. |
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Growing the
helpfulness of Agentic AI for India’s
developers |
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To its recently-announced Cloud-based
agentic AI workspace, Firebase Studio, which
helps create
full-stack AI applications
with single prompts, Google is bringing several new agentic tools and capabilities. Optimized AI templates in Firebase Studio bring the power
of Agent Mode to help developers generate and build beautiful and powerful apps on a variety of development frameworks. Other new features, like forking workspaces and integrating Firebase backend services and deploying to Firebase Hosting,
are aimed at empowering developers to collaborate, build and deploy their apps swif ly, and at no initial cost. |
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Opening India’s
developer ecosystem to new avenues for growth |
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The Indian ecosystem comprises the second largest number
of active developers on Google Play
across the world, contributing over 10 lakh
developer jobs in 2024. |
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Building compelling o?erings on Android, this ecosystem has played
an important role in shaping the impact and inclusiveness of India’s digital economy. Approximately 72% of surveyed Indian users claimed their ?rst access
to the internet was on an Android
device, about 85% say their Android
phone is one of the main ways they access digital public services, and 69% report ?rst using AI through an app on
their Android device. Device makers have also been able to make devices
a?ordable due to the open-source nature of Android, which has assisted estimated savings of INR 25,200 crore in development and operating costs. |
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In an e?ort to help this ecosystem unlock
the potential of new avenues of growth,
Google has launched ‘Google Play x Unity
Game Developer Training’, a free, immersive, and globally-recognized training and certi?cation program for aspiring and professional game
developers in India. Developed in collaboration with Unity,
the globally-leading 3D game development company behind
popular titles like Free Fire and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and the Game Developer Association of India (GDAI), the program
will guide participants through more than 30 hours
of comprehensive online
training across
three specialized learning tracks
- Game Developer, Artist,
and Programmer. In India, the program
is being o?ered initially to 500 developers, in partnership with the Governments of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and GDAI, with wider
availability and expansion being explored. |
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Google is also hosting
the Gen AI Exchange
Hackathon, which will enable developers to apply their industry-leading AI knowledge and skills to practical
use, to innovate, and build solutions. |
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Google I/O Connect India 2025 gave the
approximate 1,800 at ending developers an engaging experience ?lled with insight ul conversations and live demonstrations of Google’s new product
innovations for developers. Additionally, eight of India’s leading startups - Sarvam, CoRover, InVideo, Glance,
Dashverse, ToonSutra, Entri and Nykaa - showcased their solutions built with Google’s powerful AI models, facilitating real-world impact across
sectors. |