MAM
Gatorade India appoints Hima Das as brand ambassador
MUMBAI: Gatorade India today announced that it has signed on champion athlete Hima Das as its brand ambassador. She joins athletes PV Sindhu and Neeraj Chopra as the brand’s ambassador in India.
The brand will be paying tribute to the sprint runner by giving a new twist to its ‘Nothing Beats Gatorade’ philosophy. ‘Nothing Beats Hima. Nothing Beats Gatorade’ builds on the brand’s belief that sports performance is driven from within.
Gatorade India will also work with Hima Das during the period of partnership to understand her training and race-day nutrition better. Gatorade’s scientific formula has the right amount of fluids, electrolytes and carbohydrates that can help an athlete rehydrate, replenish and refuel while playing any sport. For over 30 years, Gatorade has been studying ways to help athletes improve performance by delivering proper hydration and nutrition.
Announcing the partnership pepsiCo India director-marketing, hydration and cola Tarun Bhagat said, “We are delighted to welcome Hima Das into Gatorade’s family of athletes. As the world’s no.1 sports drink brand, Gatorade has always aimed to identify athletes it believes in, early on in their careers and push them to power their performance by enabling them to achieve more with the right balance of nutrients including fluids, electrolytes and carbohydrates. Hima personifies the spirit of the brand through her persevering attitude and unwavering spirit to win. We believe that Gatorade is the perfect fuel to partner with Hima Das as she sets out to achieve new accolades for the country.”
Speaking about the partnership, Hima Das said, “Winning comes with long hours of practice, persistence and perspiration. Each day leading up to a race throws a new challenge and one must be equipped to take it head-on. Gatorade helps athletes like me do just that. I am honoured to join the Gatorade family which consists of sporting legends across the world. I am looking forward to working with them to understand my hydration requirements and using the insights to better my athletic performance.”
The appointment of Hima Das as a brand ambassador is a reiteration of Gatorade’s efforts to drive authenticity and partner with relevant sources of authority. The brand brought on board ace shuttler PV Sindhu in 2017, followed by javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra a year later.
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.
