Brands
Metro Brand Davinchi announces its collaboration with Desi Hangover
Mumbai: Davinchi, from the house of Metro Brands Ltd, is proud to announce its collaboration with Desi Hangover, a renowned Indian footwear label. This collaboration aims to preserve and promote the age-old tradition of handmade shoes for men and support the forgotten cobbler community of Kolhapur.
Desi Hangover specialises in using ethically procured, up-cycled leather to create comfortable and stylish handmade shoes, aligning with Metro Brands’ commitment to sustainable fashion. Through this partnership, both brands will work towards responsible and ethical practices while creating innovative, future-forward, and stylish men’s footwear collections.
“We are excited to partner with Desi Hangover, a brand that shares our passion for preserving the intricate craftsmanship of hand-making high-quality shoes,” said Metro Brands Ltd Sr VP Deepika Deepti. “With this collaboration, we aim to ensure that the ancient art and skill of handmade shoes do not become extinct in this machine-led world. The resulting line of eco-friendly, exquisitely crafted footwear for men will look great and promote ethical and sustainable fashion.”
Desi Hangover is equally enthusiastic about this partnership. “As a brand, we are passionate about being Indian and empowering local communities to keep the art, skill, and knowledge of hand-making shoes passed down through generations,” said Desi Hangover founder Abha Agrawal. “We are delighted to partner with Metro Brands Ltd and share our common passion to create something truly special and unique, without compromising on quality. We look forward to a long and fruitful association,” added Abha.
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.
