Google plans biggest India expansion yet as as US door closes

Alphabet Inc., the company that owns Google, is getting ready for a big expansion in India by locking down office space that could eventually hold tens of thousands more workers in the country’s tech center.

The Silicon Valley company has signed a lease for one office building and grabbed options for two more at Alembic City, a business development in Bangalore’s Whitefield tech area, people who know about the deal told Bloomberg. The three buildings add up to 2.4 million square feet of workspace. The first building should start bringing in workers in the next few months, with the other two set to finish up in 2026.

Real estate options let possible tenants get exclusive rights to rent or buy property at fixed prices for a certain time. But Alphabet might not use its options on the extra buildings.

If the company takes all three towers, the location could hold up to 20,000 more employees, which could more than double Alphabet’s current workforce in India, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named since the plans aren’t public yet. Right now the company has around 14,000 workers in India, out of roughly 190,000 employees around the world.

When asked about it, Alphabet said it has major operations in several Indian cities, including Bangalore. A company spokesperson said in an email that Alphabet has “only leased one tower,” with 650,000 square feet of office space. The spokesperson wouldn’t talk about options for more buildings or share how many people work for the company in India.

The expansion plans come as President Donald Trump’s immigration policies have made it harder to get foreign workers into the United States, pushing tech companies to hire more people overseas instead. India has become a really important place for American companies to find workers, especially with the race heating up in artificial intelligence.

Companies that compete with Google, including OpenAI and Anthropic PBC, have recently opened up in the country. Anthropic hired former Microsoft Corp. executive Irina Ghose to lead its India operations in January. “India has a real opportunity to shape how AI is built and deployed at scale,” Ghose said at the time.

For US tech companies, India works as a way around Washington’s tighter immigration rules. The Trump administration wants to raise fees for H-1B work visas way up to possibly $100,000 per application, which makes it a lot harder to bring Indian engineers to the US.

This change is pushing growth in what are called global capability centers, which are tech operations run by international companies in different industries, from software and retail to finance. A lot of these centers now focus on building AI products and systems. Nasscom, India’s IT industry trade group, thinks these centers will have 2.5 million employees by 2030, up from 1.9 million today.

Google is already a big player in India

Last year, it opened its largest campus in Bangalore, with indoor mini golf, pickleball courts, and cafeterias serving cardamom tea.

After that, Google posted hundreds of engineering jobs in the city, from AI practice directors in its cloud division to chip designers and machine learning specialists, many needing PhDs. YouTube, Google’s video unit, is looking for engineers to build generative AI tools.

For AI companies like Alphabet, India isn’t just about finding workers. Tens of millions of new internet users come online every year, becoming possible customers for chatbots and AI assistants, plus trying out new AI coding tools.

The India headcount for major US tech firms Facebook, Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Netflix Inc., and Google went up by 16% over the last 12 months, the biggest jump in three years, according to Xpheno Pvt, a talent solutions and staffing company.

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