Brands
Biocon launches liraglutide in the Netherlands in first EU branded debut
BENGALURU: Biocon Limited has launched its glucagon-like peptide-1 therapy, liraglutide, in the Netherlands, marking the first European Union market where the Indian bio-pharmaceutical group is selling the drug under its own brands.
The drug-device combination will be marketed as Diavorin for diabetes and Vobexoryn for chronic weight management, through Dutch partner Pharmamedic BV. The rollout follows regulatory clearance earlier this year from the Netherlands’ Medicines Evaluation Board.
The launch gives Biocon an early European foothold in the fiercely contested GLP-1 market, which has become central to global treatment strategies for diabetes and obesity. Liraglutide is already approved and widely used internationally, but this is Biocon’s first direct branded entry into the EU.
Chief executive officer and managing director Siddharth Mittal, said the move strengthens the company’s peptide-led growth strategy and underlines its ambition to expand access to affordable metabolic therapies at scale. He added that the launch reflects Biocon’s integrated manufacturing capabilities and long-term focus on sustainable healthcare systems.
Liraglutide, a once-daily injectable GLP-1 analogue, was first approved in Europe in 2009 and later cleared in the US for diabetes and obesity. Biocon said further European launches are expected as it builds out its GLP-1 portfolio across key global markets.
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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.
