Brands
CEAT signs on cricketing sensation Shafali Verma as brand ambassador
Mumbai: In a significant move to bolster its association with cricket, CEAT Ltd., India’s leading tyre manufacturer, proudly announces the signing of Shafali Verma, the prodigious Indian cricketer, as its latest brand ambassador. With this, Verma joins the esteemed list of CEAT’s cricketing brand ambassadors, which includes stalwarts like Rohit Sharma, Shubman Gill, Shreyas Iyer, Harmanpreet Kaur, and Mathew Hayden.
At the tender age of 15, Verma made history by becoming the youngest-ever cricketer to represent India, shattering a 30-year-old record previously held by the legendary Sachin Tendulkar. She further solidified her position in the annals of cricket by becoming the youngest-ever half-centurion for India. Her fearless style of play, combined with an undying passion, resilience, and an indomitable spirit, led India to clinch the U-19 ICC Cricket World Cup title.
CEAT Ltd. chief marketing officer Lakshmi Narayanan B said, “At CEAT, our dedication to cricket runs deep, and our association with the sport has only grown stronger over the years. From our annual CEAT Cricket Ratings to our strategic partnerships, we have always prioritized recognizing and rewarding outstanding performance. As we welcome Shafali Verma to the CEAT family, it’s her exceptional on-field performance that stands out. While the personality of a player is significant, it’s their consistent achievements across various formats that truly resonate with our brand’s values. Shafali embodies the spirit of excellence and determination that CEAT champions. We are thrilled to have her on board and look forward to a successful partnership, furthering our commitment to support and uplift the sport of cricket.”
Verma said, “I am thrilled to join the CEAT family. It has, for long been a brand that has been associated with some exceptional cricketers and I hope to carry on that trend. What’s more important is the role CEAT is playing in acknowledging women’s cricket, which makes this relationship even more special.”
CEAT has been synonymous with cricket, and the addition of Verma to its roster of ambassadors only reinforces its commitment to the sport.
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.
