Written by Anuj BhatiaNew Delhi | October 14, 2025 05:27 PM IST 4 min readGoogle Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian speaking at Bharat AI Shakti, an event hosted by Google in New Delhi on Tuesday, October 14, 2025. (Image: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)A top Google executive has denied that artificial intelligence is in a bubble, despite growing voices in Silicon Valley and Wall Street suggesting that a bubble may be forming and could eventually burst, as many tech companies’ fortunes are directly tied to AI technology, with billions of dollars invested in building the AI infrastructure.“If you look at the sheer amount of investment coming in from the entire ecosystem, it cannot just be a bubble. It’s really a deep investment in building AI infrastructure. It’s a self-fulfilling process. We are building infrastructure, developing capabilities, taking them to market, and customers are using them,” Karan Bajwa, President of Google Cloud, Asia Pacific, told indianexpress.com at a select media roundtable at an event in Delhi on Tuesday. Tech heavyweights like Google are investing heavily in artificial intelligence infrastructure and operating AI models, even though it may take years to recoup these investments. Nonetheless, they continue to invest. The cost of data center-related spending – the giant buildings full of GPUs (graphical processing units), racks, and servers used by large AI firms to generate responses and train models – probably accounts for a major portion of the expenses. In fact, according to estimates, a little more than half of the cost of a data center is attributed to the GPU chips, which make up over 60 per cent. The rest consists of cooling and energy costs, and only a relatively small component is the actual construction of the data center building.Also Read | Google to spend $15 billion on AI data centre in biggest India investmentWall Street and investors, however, are increasingly concerned about how they will get their investment back – or when. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, continues to argue that AI could bring transformative changes, unlock opportunities that aren’t yet visible, and boost productivity across the economy. Karan Bajwa, President of Google Cloud, Asia Pacific. (Image: The Indian Express/ Anuj Bhatia)“I would say there is a very real-life impact that has been created with AI,” Bajwa said. Another senior Google executive added, “When we release a new model, for example, within a few hours we are hitting upwards of a trillion tokens being processed in and out. That just shows how many people are consistently eager to use these new models as soon as they become available.”Alphabet’s Google, one of the top cloud service providers alongside Microsoft and Amazon’s AWS, is building large AI data centers and expanding infrastructure deployments, continuously adding more AI compute capacity to meet growing demand and user adoption from both consumers and enterprises. At the same time, major tech companies are caught in a race to maintain dominance and are increasingly seeking new ways to generate revenue.Also Read | Google launches Gemini Enterprise, a new platform for workplace automation using AI agentsDuring a high-profile event in Delhi on Tuesday, attended by senior government ministers including Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister for Railways, Information & Broadcasting, and Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, the Mountain View, California-based company announced a $15 billion investment to build data center capacity for a new AI hub in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The investment will be rolled out over the next five years, and the Visakhapatnam data center will become Google’s largest AI hub in the world outside of the United States.Story continues below this adBut building data centers is a costly endeavor. One of the biggest lingering concerns is the stress these data centers place on local power grids and the significant water consumption they require. Data centers that power artificial intelligence consume immense amounts of water to cool overheated servers, as well as indirectly through electricity generation. With local communities in the US already pushing back against the construction of new data centers, experts say companies may increasingly offshore data center operations to countries like India. US data center demand could triple by 2030, according to McKinsey. By 2030, data centers could account for more than 14 per cent of the United States’ total power demand. Anuj Bhatia is a personal technology writer at indianexpress.com who has been covering smartphones, personal computers, gaming, apps, and lifestyle tech actively since 2011. He specialises in writing longer-form feature articles and explainers on trending tech topics. His unique interests encompass delving into vintage tech, retro gaming and composing in-depth narratives on the intersection of history, technology, and popular culture. He covers major international tech conferences and product launches from the world's biggest and most valuable tech brands including Apple, Google and others. At the same time, he also extensively covers indie, home-grown tech startups. Prior to joining The Indian Express in late 2016, he served as a senior tech writer at My Mobile magazine and previously held roles as a reviewer and tech writer at Gizbot. Anuj holds a postgraduate degree from Banaras Hindu University. You can find Anuj on Linkedin. Email: anuj.bhatia@indianexpress.com ... Read More© IE Online Media Services Pvt LtdTags:Google