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Festive wheels turn faster as car platform hits record traffic
MUMBAI: CarTrade Tech’s consumer platforms struck gold yesterday, recording their highest-ever single-day traffic as Indians hunt for festival bargains on wheels. The company told the Bombay stock exchange that CarWale and BikeWale saw visitor numbers rocket by 74 per cent compared with the first day of Navratri last year, and 60 per cent above August’s daily average.
The surge points to renewed vigour in India’s car market, helped along by recent GST rate cuts that have made vehicles more affordable. For a sector that has endured sluggish demand, the spike offers a tantalising glimpse of better times ahead.
“Yesterday was a landmark day for our platforms,” said CarTrade consumer group chief executive Banwari Lal Sharma. “The festive excitement, amplified by GST-led affordability, has fuelled unprecedented consumer activity.”
Whether this traffic translates into actual sales—and signals a broader revival in consumer sentiment during the festival season—remains to be seen. But for India’s media and entertainment companies, which depend heavily on advertising from car manufacturers, the numbers will make for cheerful reading.
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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.
