MAM
The Ad Club & AAAI decides to refund Abby 2020 entry fees
MUMBAI: The Advertising Club has been curating many idea exchange and awards platforms that celebrate extraordinary creative work. Abby Awards presented by The Advertising Club is one such award that has been held for the past 50 years. Held every year at the prestigious Goafest, the awards have gone on to become the most coveted creative recognition in the Industry. However, it has taken an unprecedented happening – the Covid2019 and associated lockdown, to break this consistency for the first time in the history of ABBY awards.
The pandemic has most certainly thrown new challenges and has disrupted the schedules of many reputed and popular global events. It has brought about changes which were hitherto unheard of. Despite these very challenging circumstances, the spirit of ABBYs was high and we received more than 2500 entries, which was extremely heartening.
The organising committee of ABBY Awards discussed the probability of holding or not holding the awards at length on multiple occasions. Given the current business environment and outlook, The Advertising Club and AAAI have unanimously decided that the money towards the submission of the entries be refunded and the awards be paused for the year. This is in the interest of the A&M community, given the need for cost optimization. A sum of Rs.1,40,00,000 (One crore forty lakhs) received through submission of entries, thus 99 per cent of the money received, have been refunded.
Going forward, in the best interest of the entrants, we are contemplating submission of two years of work in the coming year so that they will not lose out on an opportunity to enter the good work done this year.
The Advertising Club president Partho Dasgupta said “We stand with the A&M community during these difficult times. It has been an unprecedented year requiring unprecedented decisions. In such circumstances, it is most important to optimize costs and focus on delivering business efficiencies. Given the pressure on cost and our focus on driving the industry’s growth agenda, it was imperative to pivot towards facilitating reduction in expenditure. We are sure that the tide will soon turn and we will see a definite recovery that will allow us to come back better and stronger.”
The Advertising Club will continue to work on behalf of the advertising and marketing industry and is optimistic that things will soon return to normalcy. The apex industry body will take fresh stock of the situation just before the commencement of the festive season.
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.
