Digital
Karnataka Bank launches “Door step Gold loan facility” in collaboration with SahiBandhu
Mumbai: Karnataka Bank, a leading private sector Bank is launching “Door -Step Gold Loan” facility named “KBL-Swarna Bandhu” for its customers, a unique product for gold loans with end to end digitization. Through this product, the Bank will be able to provide Gold Loan Services at customer’s doorstep. Initially, this product will be available to customers in select centres of the Bank and will be gradually rolled out to all the branches of the Bank.
Karnataka Bank is well positioned to expand its Gold loan portfolio and capitalise on the huge market opportunity. Door step Gold Loan product is a big step towards Bank’s goal of creating a robust & healthy Gold loan portfolio. By leveraging on technology services & Door step service framework, Karnataka Bank aims to focus on quality gold loan portfolio in the ensuing days.
To achieve this, the bank has partnered with SahiBandhu, a leading aggregator platform for gold loans backed by The Manipal Group. SahiBandhu will act as a Corporate Business Correspondent and a Lending Service Provider. This collaboration aligns with extant guidelines on digital lending and will also help in improving the gold loan portfolio of Bank. KBL-Swarna Bandhu showcases the comprehensive digital capabilities of both KBL and SahiBandhu.
Karnataka Bank CEO & MD SriKrishnan H has expressed that, “Door Step Gold loan lending model is one of the innovative avenues of lending against gold. “KBL-Swarna Bandhu” shall create a dynamic synergy in the entire gold loan portfolio of the Bank. This arrangement will help us in extending gold loans at the Door step of the customers once again proving our Bank’s orientation towards collaborative digital innovations to improve the customer service arena and by this we aim to achieve better Customer Delight.”
Speaking on this occasion, Karnataka Bank executive director Sekhar Rao stated that “Bank is progressing on the Fintech initiatives with strong collaborations with partners in various fields. This initiative is also, one among the many such steps taken by the Bank. Our aim is to see this Century old Bank in a new Digital Avatar.”
On KBL-Swarna Bandhu launch, SahiBandhu CEO & co-founder Rajesh Shet has expressed that, “As we continue to expand our footprint in the ever-evolving financial landscape, we are excited to announce our strategic partnership with Karnataka Bank (KBL). Our innovative tech platform enables gold loan at the customer doorstep. Through our unwavering commitment to customer-centricity, we continue to excel in the gold loan industry. Together with KBL, we are poised to unlock new opportunities, offering digital-first lending solutions through our gold loan aggregator platform.”
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.
