MAM
Big TV invests Rs 500 million in new brand campaign
MUMBAI: Big TV, the direct-to-home arm of Reliance ADAG, is investing Rs 500 million in its new brand campaign, ‘Joy of Ownership‘. The six-week long campaign aims to target 2,000 GRPs across various channels in the Hindi general entertainment space, news, sports, kids, music and movie channels. The 360 degree campaign will spread across, print, radio, online, OOH, television and BTL. More than 100 publications, 50 radio stations and 1,000 websites are being targeted for the new campaign. Leo Burnett has developed the new TVC. Big TV SVP Umesh Rao said, “The new TV commercial is structured on customer advocacy and aims to promote a sense of ‘joy of ownership‘ of Reliance Big TV.” As part of their online campaign, the company has planned a day-long roadblock on websites such as Yahoo, Rediff, MSN and Sify. Big TV‘s online campaign is scheduled to start by the week-end on 1000 websites.
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.
