MAM
Confident Group to sponsor West Indies cricket team in two ICC events
MUMBAI: The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) has announced Confident Group as the West Indies Team Sponsor for the ICC Champions Trophy in England next month and ICC World Twenty20 2014 in Bangladesh.
Confident Group is an Indian conglomerate, headquartered in Bangalore with interests in infrastructure, hospitality, aviation, entertainment, education and health care. Confident Group owns and operates hotels in Bangalore.
WICB CEO Michael Muirhead said, “We welcome Confident Group as our team sponsor for these two mega world cricketing events. The West Indies Team, having won the World Twenty20 in 2012 is one of the most attractive teams for a sponsor to be associated with in international cricket at the moment and we are delighted to have the Confident Group on board for the Champions Trophy and the World Twenty20 in 2014 when the West Indies will defend our title.”
“This association of the West Indies Team with another major Asian company is significant from the point of view that we are able to attract some of the most high profile companies from a dynamic and wide-ranging cricket market to our portfolio and it is a demonstration of the confidence of the corporate sector in West Indies cricket which remains a strong brand on the global cricket stage,” he added.
Confident Group chairman, MD Dr. Roy CJ said, “As a Group, we see and believe that there exists tremendous value in being associated with a talented, high profile and lively team like the West Indies. We will be partnering with them as the lead sponsor of the team for the upcoming ICC Champions Trophy and the 2014 ICC World Twenty20. The West Indian team boasts of cricketing legends from time immemorial and the confidence the current team exudes is surely something that energises us as a brand as well. Cricket has undergone a sea change over the years and the sheer reach of the game forms a perfect fit in our business expansion plans as well.”
Sports marketing agency Total Sports Asia facilitated the sponsorship. The company‘s VP sales and marketing Tuhin Mishra said, “It has been an honour and privilege to work with the West Indies Cricket Board and Confident Group. This is yet another landmark deal from TSA‘s stable and the very first for any Indian brand like Confident Group who is reaching out to a global audience through West Indies cricket sponsorship.”
Digital
Google partners with Adani and Airtel to build India’s largest AI data centre
The three-campus complex, built with Adani and Airtel, is India’s largest-ever technology infrastructure investment
Visakhapatnam: Google has broken ground on what it is billing as India’s largest-ever technology infrastructure project: a gigawatt-scale artificial intelligence hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, built in partnership with AdaniConneX and Nxtra by Airtel. The ceremony at Tarluvada on 28th April marked the start of construction on a three-campus data centre complex that sits at the heart of a $15 billion investment Google has committed to deploying across India between 2026 and 2030.
The numbers are staggering by any measure. Nearly 1 gigawatt of compute capacity at a single location, three data centre campuses, a fibre-optic expansion under the America-India Connect initiative, and a long-term clean energy strategy designed to feed new renewable supply into the national grid. Google says the project will help India hit its target of 500 gigawatts of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030 while delivering the high-performance, low-latency infrastructure that businesses need to build and scale AI-powered services.
The groundbreaking drew a formidable gathering of political and corporate India. Union minister for information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw, Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and state IT minister Nara Lokesh attended alongside Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian, Adani Group directors Karan Adani and Jeet Adani, and Bharti Enterprises vice chairman Rakesh Mittal.
Vaishnaw framed the project in terms of national ambition. “The India AI hub and three subsea cables landing in Visakhapatnam will become very important infrastructure for the country’s journey forward,” he said, adding his thanks to Google for its “continued trust in India.” Naidu was equally bullish, describing Andhra Pradesh as “India’s premier investment destination” and the Vizag hub as a cornerstone of the state’s technology corridor. “Our vision goes beyond attracting investment,” he said. “We want local talent, startups, and enterprises to become active partners in this technology-driven growth story.”
Kurian called the groundbreaking “a powerful realization of our shared vision with the Indian government, and an inflection point for the country’s AI-native future.” Jeet Adani was characteristically direct: “When energy becomes more affordable and increasingly powered by clean sources, intelligence becomes more accessible, and that is how India will lead the next phase of digital growth.” Gopal Vittal, executive vice chairman of Bharti Airtel, said the full stack of data centres, green power, pan-India fibre and a next-generation cable landing station would enable “large-scale, world-class AI infrastructure in Vizag.”
The project was first announced in October 2025. AdaniConneX and Nxtra by Airtel will lead construction of the data centre buildings and connecting infrastructure, with Google deploying its AI capabilities on top.
Beyond the hardware, Google has announced a substantial package of community programmes. On water, it is partnering with Sponge Collaborative on a watershed management plan linking coastal ecosystem restoration with clean drinking water systems, including reverse osmosis plants and Water ATMs, for local residents. On livelihoods, a tie-up with the Sambhav Foundation will equip more than 1,000 fisherfolk with GPS navigation, weather-forecasting tools, cold-chain management training and UPI-based financial literacy. The Google Udaan India Fund, run through ChangeX, will provide direct grants to local schools and social enterprises for AI skilling labs and digital literacy programmes. The NARI Shakti programme, developed with the Learning Links Foundation, will support more than 10,000 women entrepreneurs from low-income backgrounds in building micro-enterprises. The Skills Trade and Readiness programme will prepare more than 1,000 local workers for construction, welding and facility operations roles, while a parallel tie-up with ICT Academy will train more than 1,200 students and educators in cloud computing and generative AI.
The groundbreaking was accompanied by the Bharat AI Shakti Conclave, a conference organised with the Andhra Pradesh government and Nara Lokesh, bringing together suppliers, industry partners and infrastructure firms to map how Google’s anchor investment can be turned into a broader economic value chain for the region. The conclave’s central theme was building an AI industrial corridor, with a local-first procurement approach and the integration of regional small and medium enterprises into Google’s global operational frameworks.
Every major technology company in the world has been courting India. What sets Vizag apart is the sheer scale of the commitment and the deliberate effort to build an industrial ecosystem around it rather than simply plant servers in a field. Google is not just betting on India’s digital future; it is trying to build the factory floor on which that future gets made. Whether the $15 billion translates into genuine local opportunity, or merely into an impressive data centre humming quietly on the Andhra Pradesh coast, will depend on whether those community programmes prove as durable as the hardware. The groundbreaking, as ever, is the easy part.
