At the Google I/O Connect India 2025 event held in Bengaluru on Wednesday, Google unveiled a series of initiatives aimed at strengthening India’s AI capabilities and empowering its developer community.
A major highlight of the event was the announcement of localised onshore processing for Gemini 2.5 Flash. This move will provide faster, low-latency AI performance for Indian developers, particularly in regulated sectors like healthcare, finance, and governance.
“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,” said Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind.
Google reiterated its support for India’s growing developer ecosystem, noting that its Play and Android platforms contributed ₹4 lakh crore in revenue and helped create 35 lakh jobs in 2024. The company also introduced agentic AI tools and optimised templates in Firebase Studio, allowing developers to build and deploy full-stack AI applications more quickly and efficiently.
In the mobile commerce space, Google expanded access to more than 250 million mapped places globally. It also introduced India-specific pricing for its Google Maps UI components. Additionally, AI-powered summaries in the Places API will help developers create location-based services tailored to Indian users.
To further support AI innovation in India, Google is collaborating with three India AI Mission startups—Sarvam, Soket AI, and Gnani—on developing Make-in-India AI models based on its open-source Gemma models. Sarvam’s latest innovation, the “Sarvam-Translate” model, is an example of this effort. Google is also working with IIT Bombay’s BharatGen to develop Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models for Indic languages.
In support of India’s vibrant game development scene, Google launched the ‘Google Play x Unity Game Developer Training’ program. Developed in partnership with Unity and GDAI, the program aims to train 500 Indian developers in its first phase. It will offer more than 30 hours of specialised training across different game development roles.
The Gen AI Exchange Hackathon was also introduced during the event to inspire developers to apply their AI skills to real-world challenges. Startups such as Sarvam, InVideo, Glance, and Nykaa showcased innovative AI-powered solutions built using Google’s models.
These announcements reflect Google’s growing focus on empowering developers in India and boosting the country’s AI-driven digital economy.
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