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Nagaland welcomes Air India Express jet in Tsüngkotepsü colours
DIMAPUR: Nagaland’s festive season took flight as chief minister Neiphiu Rio welcomed Air India Express’ newest Boeing 737-8 at Dimapur Airport, sporting a striking Tsüngkotepsü livery inspired by the Ao tribe’s iconic warrior shawl. The aircraft’s arrival marks the airline’s role as official travel partner of the Hornbill Festival 2025. Traditional dancers set the tone with a vibrant welcome that captured the festival’s spirit.
Celebrated every year from 1 to 10 December, the Hornbill Festival is known as the ‘Festival of Festivals’, drawing visitors from across India and abroad. Showcasing folklore, craftsmanship, and the diverse traditions of Nagaland’s tribes, it offers an unmatched window into the State’s cultural identity. The partnership with Air India Express aims to make the journey as memorable as the destination.
Chief minister Rio said the new livery honours the Ao tribe’s artistic legacy and carries a part of Nagaland’s story across India. He noted that the collaboration will help welcome more visitors and deepen cultural understanding during the festival season.
Air India Express managing director Aloke Singh said the airline is proud to support Nagaland’s signature celebration. He added that the Hornbill spirit, warm and expressive, aligns with the airline’s Tales of India initiative, which highlights regional stories through art on aircraft tails. The Tsüngkotepsü design on the new aircraft VT-BWD is a tribute to Nagaland’s creativity and cultural pride.
To encourage travel during the festival, the airline is offering a 15 per cent discount on flights to and from Dimapur for bookings made until 10 December using the promo code Hornboill. A Hornbill-themed photobooth at Dimapur Airport and a community art canvas at the festival site in Kisama add to the experience. Travellers can also win free flights by sharing photos tagged with airindiax and XploreMore.
Air India Express operates daily services connecting Dimapur to Guwahati, with convenient onward links to Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata and Patna. Across the Northeast, the airline runs an extensive network that strengthens access to the region.
The Hornbill partnership follows a series of guest-centric initiatives by the airline that celebrate India’s festive calendar. Air India Express has also refreshed its Boeing 737-8 cabin with upgraded seats, USB charging ports, improved lighting and hot meal capability for a more comfortable journey.
With designs featuring textiles from Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Mizoram already gracing its fleet, the airline’s Tales of India programme continues to take the country’s many stories to the skies. This year, Nagaland’s Tsüngkotepsü joins the journey.
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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.
