MAM
Aegis strengthens digital footprint in Ireland
MUMBAI: Focused media and digital communications group Aegis Group has acquired Irish web design and development agency Lucidity Digital. Lucidity will become part of Aegis‘s digital creative origination network, Isobar, and will be re-branded Lucidity Isobar in Ireland.
The ten-year old agency provides a wide range of creative and production solutions for both web and mobile. The acquisition of Lucidity will allow Aegis Media clients access to a full suite of digital creative and production services and will further strengthen the Aegis Media Digital position in the Irish market.
Aegis Media Ireland CEO Liam McDonnell said: “We are delighted to be acquiring Lucidity, which will enhance the prospects of our business in the Irish market, allowing us to offer greater integration across digital media and creative. We welcome the Lucidity team into the fold and look forward to working with our new colleagues to leverage the exciting opportunities this acquisition will bring to our business in Ireland.”
Lucidity co-founder Jim Cassidy said, “We are delighted to be joining the innovative and pioneering Aegis Media network. This transaction will allow us to really scale our business in terms of both service offering and client base. We are already looking forward to working with our new colleagues to deliver outstanding digital creative and media solutions for our clients.”
Brands
Google secures AP discom licence to power $15bn Vizag AI hub
First-of-its-kind move gives tech giant grid control for massive 1GW campus
VISAKHAPATNAM: Google has secured a rare electricity distribution company licence in Andhra Pradesh, marking a decisive shift from being just a power consumer to becoming a power distributor for its upcoming mega data centre hub in Visakhapatnam.
The move effectively rewrites the rulebook for hyperscalers in India. Instead of relying on state utilities, Google will be able to procure electricity directly from generators, including its own renewable sources. This not only cuts out intermediaries but also gives the company tighter control over supply, reliability and long-term costs.
For a business where electricity can account for up to 60 per cent of operating expenses, the economics are hard to ignore. Even more critical is uptime. Data centres demand near-perfect reliability, and owning the distribution layer allows Google to manage outages and load balancing with far greater precision.
At the heart of the plan is a sprawling 1-gigawatt data centre ecosystem spread across more than 600 acres in three locations near Vizag. With an estimated investment of $15 billion over five years, the project is set to become India’s largest single foreign direct investment and Google’s biggest AI-focused facility outside the United States.
The campus is being designed with artificial intelligence workloads in mind, housing the company’s custom tensor processing units to power services such as Gemini, Search and Google Cloud. In scale, the planned capacity is comparable to powering a small city.
Google is not building alone. It has partnered with Adani Infrastructure to develop the physical campuses, while Bharti Airtel will set up an international subsea cable landing station. This connectivity backbone is expected to link the hub directly to a dozen countries, ensuring low latency for global data traffic.
Vizag’s coastal location plays a key role in that strategy. It enables direct access to subsea cables and provides the large volumes of water needed for cooling data centre operations. Equally important is policy backing from the Government of Andhra Pradesh, which fast-tracked approvals and granted the uncommon discom licence to anchor the investment.
Groundbreaking is scheduled for April 28, 2026, with phased commissioning expected to begin by July 2028.
The broader signal is clear. As AI workloads surge, hyperscalers are no longer content plugging into existing infrastructure. They are beginning to build and control it. In Vizag, Google is not just setting up a data centre, it is wiring up its own future.
