MAM
Rishi Khiani to step down from Ant Farm to build a startup in the Job-tech space
MUMBAI: Serial innovator Rishi Khiani has announced that he will be stepping down from day-to-day operations at Ant Farm, a digital innovation company that he founded in 2013. While he steps down from his operational role, Rishi will continue to be a promoter shareholder in Ant Farm and its downstream companies. The move is a planned one so that he can focus on his startup in the Job-tech space.
Ant Farm is a studio incubator that builds businesses and scales up disruptive ideas. The company had raised funding from funds such as Agnus & Bay Capital and counts prominent investors such as Ravi Dhariwal, Radhakishan Damani and Sat Pal Khattar on its cap table.
Some of it’s successful companies are Ad-tech and Content company Fork Media Group that owns and operates Curly Tales, Hauterfly, IGN, Mashable, FameFox and AskMen, multi-category delivery startup Scootsy that was recently acquired by Swiggy, mobile fitness platform RevoFit that is backed by Marico and Hello Green, a healthy and affordable meal delivery service. The management of parent company, Ant Farm, will be transitioned to co-founder Upen Roop Rai.
During the announcement, Rishi Khiani said “I founded Ant Farm back in 2013 when India had just seen a disruption in the startup space. The idea was to accelerate companies during their early-stage with an intensive hands-on approach backed by an experienced team in the given sector. It was a thrilling experience to build some great companies in the last eight years.”
Commenting on his career plans, Khiani added “Given the current scenario of the economy and the job market in our country, my next startup will focus on enabling the next billion jobs. Given that ambition and the opportunity it was important to clear my desk of all other responsibilities.
Stay tuned for some exciting updates!” Rishi Khiani, who is a seasoned entrepreneur and former CEO of Times Internet, has over 20 years of experience in media, consumer tech and enterprise space. He is known to have
launched some of India's iconic homegrown digital brands. Rishi sold his first startup UrbanEye Media to the Network18 group in 2006. Keeping up to his innovation skills, Rishi will be entering the job-tech industry, to bridge the gap between jobs and job seekers across various industries.
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.
