MAM
The Ad Club re-elects Partho Dasgupta as president
MUMBAI: Advertising, Marketing and media industry’s apex body – The Advertising Club today announced the Managing Committee for the current fiscal i.e. FY 2020-21 at its sixty sixth annual general meeting. Its current president Partho Dasgupta has been re-elected to lead the body. Under his able leadership, in the past one year, TAC has covered new grounds especially in the area of learning and development, enabling Indian advertising industry to imbibe global best practices, innovate and garner global recognition. He has also come out in support of the industry in these unprecedented times by proactively refunding entry fees for the ABBY Awards 2020.
The Ad Club president Partho Dasgupta said, “It has been an honor to serve and be re-elected as the President of one of the most prestigious Advertising Clubs in the country, and I am truly humbled by the faith and trust that my Industry peers and seniors have bestowed upon me. This is a difficult year for all of us and I look forward to doing our best for the Club in the forthcoming year. As expressed in the beginning of the year, the committee has gone beyond our Marquee events and tried to do new things this year. Initiatives like Leadership Development Programme is something we would like to push forward this year too.”
The below members were elected unopposed.
The Office Bearers of The Advertising Club for 2020-2021 are:
· Partha Sinha: Vice President
· Dr. Bhaskar Das: Secretary
· Aditya Swamy: Jt. Secretary
· Shashi Sinha: Treasurer
Managing committee members include the below-mentioned industry leaders who will play a decisive role in driving synergies and ensuring the success of all The Advertising Club initiatives. These include – Vikas Khanchandani, Pradeep Dwivedi, Sonia Huria, Mitrajit Bhattacharya, Sidharth Rao, Punitha Arumugam, and Raj Nayak.
Here is the list co-opted industry professionals Ajay Kakar, Rana Barua and Sabbas Joseph
The below list of leaders will continue to bring value to The Advertising Club through their expertise and deep understanding of the respective industry segments. These include Debabrata Mukherjee, Avinash Pant, Ajay Chandwani, Kartik Sharma, Asha Kharga, Rathi Gangappa, Sapangeet Rajwant, Namrata Tata, and Sanjay Adesara.
Vikram Sakhuja will continue as a member of the managing committee as the immediate past president for the ensuing year.
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.
