Powering India’s AI Progress

At Google, we have always championed the promise of AI to vastly improve the human condition, and to help solve complex, systemic challenges. At our “Lab to Impact: Google on Health, Science and Society,” dialogue event today, supported by the India - AI Impact Summit 2026, we committed to continue bringing our full-stack approach to the country’s AI-powered ambition, from supporting the foundations of this ambition to its on-ground impact.

We announced a series of key collaborations and investments, leveraging our best AI to bolster India’s Digital Public Infrastructure, while empowering the research, developer, and startup ecosystem to solve national challenges and meet large-scale social needs.

Partnering to Build the Foundation of India’s AI Ambition

Integrating AI into India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for healthcare

Today we announced funding of $400,000 to support new collaborations that will leverage MedGemma to build India’s Health Foundation Models, with the aim to improve the efficiency of healthcare providers and support patient outcomes throughout India. As a first step, Ajna Lens will work with experts from India’s flagship medical institute, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to build models that will support India-specific use cases in Dermatology and OPD Triaging. The models built through this collaboration will contribute to India’s Digital Public Infrastructure, and their outcomes will be made available to the ecosystem. Additionally, researchers, AI experts and clinicians from IISc will explore using AI models to solve for broader clinical use cases.

We are also working with India’s National Health Authority (NHA) to deploy our advanced AI to convert millions of fragmented, unstructured medical records, such as doctor's clinical and progress notes, into the international, machine-readable FHIR standard. Along with helping patients better understand their medical information, and reducing the burden of documentation on patients and hospitals, this foundational shift will also advise much better data-driven policy decisions for India’s public healthcare strategy.

Google is also working with NHA to bring over 400,000 NHA-registered health facilities, including hospitals, clinics, and diagnostic labs, on Google Maps and Search. This will help people easily search for and navigate to their nearest health centers with the most updated official information.

Strengthening India’s AI research ecosystem, and the government’s vision of India’s AI leadership

Throughout our journey in India, Google has supported India’s scientists and researchers in championing the country’s innovation journey. Over the last five years alone, Google has supported nearly 1000 years of PhD-level research work across 25+ leading research institutions in India, including at the country’s premier institutes. Our global PhD Fellowship program has supported 166 Indian PhD students throughout its history, with this year’s recipients from India leading inspiring foundational and applied research - from computer vision foundational models, to models that understand and support mental disorders.

We are now taking another significant step to support India’s research ecosystem. Through our philanthropic arm, Google.org, we are announcing funding support totalling $8 million to four AI Centres of Excellence established by the Government of India to support its vision of, "Make AI in India and Make AI work for India":

• TANUH at IISc Bangalore: Developing scalable AI solutions to support effective treatment of non-communicable diseases
• Airawat Research Foundation, IIT Kanpur: Driving research on how AI can transform urban governance
• AI Centre of Excellence for Education, IIT Madras: Developing solutions that help enhance learning and teaching outcomes
• ANNAM.AI at IIT Ropar: Developing data-driven solutions for agriculture and farmer welfare

To continue advancing our commitment to Inclusive AI, Google is announcing a $2 million founding contribution to establish the new Indic Language Technologies Research Hub at IIT Bombay. This hub, set up in memory of Professor Pushpak Bhattacharyya, a pioneer in Indic language technologies who trained generations of scientists in language research and was a Visiting Researcher at Google DeepMind, will aim to ensure that as AI advances globally, it serves India’s linguistic diversity.

Empowering the Ecosystem to deploy AI for Scaled and Sustainable Impact

Equipping developers with our open models to power indigenous AI

We’ve even been encouraged by the enthusiasm with which Indian startups have embraced the benchmark-leading Indic capabilities of our foundational AI models. Startups Gnani.AI and CoRover.AI have been leveraging Gemma to build Voice AI models and e-governance–focused models serving Indic language solutions.

We are providing these startups with funding of $50,000 each to further power their sustained and varied efforts to bring more of the Indian diaspora into the fold of AI. We are also supporting IIT-Bombay with a grant of $50,000 as it uses Gemma to process Indic language health governance and policy documents to build a novel ‘India-Centric Trait Database’ that will contain information about diseases, phenotypes, and genetic conditions relevant to the Indian population.

Additionally, to further democratize access to our foundational open models, we’ve uploaded all 22 Gemma models on AIKosh, the India AI Mission’s open data and model platform. We aim for this measure to help the Indian developer community build indigenous models that scale the Make-in-India ambition to all-new heights.

Empowering India's changemakers to deploy AI for India’s pressing challenges

We continue to be inspired by Indian innovators’ and changemakers’ commitment to solve for India, and will continue to support this ecosystem as it builds AI-powered solutions on the foundational layer of India’s AI ambition.

Powered by our Open Health Stack, a suite of open-source tools for next-gen digital health solutions, Indian nonprofit Khushi Baby has successfully conducted over 35 million screenings for tuberculosis in Rajasthan this year using a TB Active Case Finding (ACF) screening module. The integration with the Open Health Stack ensured compliance of the solution with international standards and the Indian government’s digital health mission and national effort for tuberculosis elimination.

Third-party research has found that AI-powered digital tools could boost the labour productivity of India’s 1 million+ ASHA frontline workers, enabling them to deliver an additional 98 million visits to rural patients each year. Research has also estimated that AI-assisted screening tools could save the Indian public around ₹390 billion ($4.7 billion) a year, equivalent to approximately 12% of India's total out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure.

We are supporting Wadhwani AI with $2.5 million Google.org funding to help pilot HealthVaani, an LLM-based conversational AI assistant launched in partnership with the Ministries of Health and Family Welfare and Women and Child Development to support ASHA and Anganwadi workers. A multimodal and multilingual solution, HealthVaani uses Gemini 2.5-Flash to support translations, answer generation and moderation, while the advanced Gemini Embedding Model supports response retrieval.

We are also providing Google.org funding of $2 million to help Wadhwani AI develop and deploy Garuda, a new Indian language model for agriculture that will power the multilingual, AI-driven smartphone application AgriVaani. Powered by Garuda, AgriVaani will provide India’s farmers and agri-workers with accurate, contextually relevant advisories on crop and livestock management, pest detection, and climate-smart practices.

Ensuring AI’s long-term impact is powered sustainably

We’ve seen the multidimensional and far-reaching impact of AI in solving for access and assisting efficiency across high-impact and pervasive applications. As more of the ecosystem realizes and unlocks AI’s potential, we expect AI-powered innovations to grow multifold.

Emphasizing our firm belief in ensuring the scaled impact of AI is powered responsibly and sustainably, we are partnering with ReNew Energy to support a new 150 megawatt (MW) solar project in Rajasthan, India. Under a long-term agreement, we will receive environmental attribute certificates (EACs), and allocate them to our value chain emissions. In tandem, we will continue to engage with key suppliers to increase their adoption of clean energy. This initiative aims to address the energy footprint of our supply chain, while also demonstrating a clear pathway for organizations to credibly address emissions across the AI value chain.

This partnership builds on our previous collaborations with Adani Group and Clean Max to add 186 MW of wind and solar power to India’s grid, and contributing to India’s 2030 target of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel-based electricity.

At Google, we don't stop at theoretical breakthroughs—we engineer real-world transformation. And we have seen this transformation being realized in India, bringing the country to the edge of a monumental AI-powered leap. As we marshal our resources to support India in harnessing this moment, we invite its institutions and innovators to join us, transforming the promise of technology into a tangible, systemic, and equitable reality for India and the world.