MAM
Interbrand elevates Gonzalo Brujó to global chief executive role; appoints Ashish Mishra as CEO- India & South Asia
MUMBAI: Brand consultancy, Interbrand, announced a series of senior staff promotions, aimed to create a revised leadership structure globally and for the South Asia region. Gonzalo Brujó is now the global chief executive officer (CEO). Brujó succeeds Charles Trevail, who will take on the role of executive chairman. Another key people development also took place with the elevation of Ashish Mishra as the CEO of India & South Asia.
Brujó has been global president since February 2021, leading day-to-day operations of Interbrand whilst maintaining leadership of the company’s growth agenda, which builds off his highly successful tenure as global chief growth officer. He spent more than 15 years scaling the Interbrand business in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
“It’s a great honour to step into this senior leadership role at Interbrand at such a pivotal moment,” said Brujó. “The role that brands play in our lives is fundamentally changing – as is the world we live in. Branding is no longer a moment in time, and the brands that stand still will quickly lose relevance. I am excited to partner with our world-class clients and employees to achieve game-changing results in this rapidly shifting landscape.”
Ashish Mishra also spoke about what contributed to its consistently high performance in the local and adjacent markets. “We are the world’s premier brand consultancy and I’m privileged and honoured to be leading growth in these key markets to greater heights. But what’s more satisfying is the fact that we have been able to drive some much-needed shifts in the Indian business mindset. Elevating branding to a respectful, strategic status; getting a seat for branding at the management and board levels; encouraging the advertising and packaging design-bred marketing fraternity to begin to see brands as a strategic tool to drive business value. It also establishes the consciousness around the idea of brand value and valuation through our IPs – Best Global Brands and Best Indian Brands.”
These elevations highlight Interbrand’s push to make what it calls “Iconic Moves”, which are bold steps taken to help brands leap ahead of customer expectations and drive competitive advantage. Iconic Moves are a part of pivotal shifts in the world of brands and branding being driven by Interbrand worldwide, according to the company.
Currently, Interbrand India, a full-service consultancy started in 2013, will step up the branding practice across the region by letting their brands drive broader business arena opportunities, and developing more efficient business models, according to the company.
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.
