Pichai meets Modi, announces Google will invest $10 billion in India's digitisation fund

Indian-origin CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, on Friday met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington, after which the executive announced that his organisation would be investing $10 billion in India's digitisation fund.

Prime Minister Modi was on a three-day state visit to the United States, where he has been meeting the chief executives of major global players including Micron and Applied Materials, both of whom have committed to investing in India.

"It was an honour to meet PM Modi during the historic visit to the US. We shared with the Prime Minister that Google is investing $10 billion in India's digitisation fund," the Chennai-born CEO said.

"We are excited today that we are announcing the opening up of our global fintech operation centre in GIFT city Gujarat," Pichai added.

The Alphabet CEO also talked about India's digital presence, saying that the Prime Minister's vision for India's digitisation was ahead of its time.

"PM's vision for Digital India was way ahead of his time I now see it as a blueprint that other countries are looking to do," Pichai said after his meeting with Modi.

Pichai and Modi have shared a rapport ever since the IIT-Kharagpur graduate took the reins at Google, with the pair meeting once before in New Delhi, last year. During that visit, Pichai said he looked forward to continuing strong partnerships and supporting India's G20 presidency to advance open internet that works for all.

The Alphabet boss added that he was looking forward to the progress India will make with the additional $10 billion, adding a few ideas of his own.

"That includes our efforts to build a single, unified AI model that will be capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text - part of our global effort to bring the world's 1,000 most-spoken languages online and to help people access knowledge and information in their preferred language. We're also supporting a new, multidisciplinary centre for responsible AI with IIT Madras," he said.

Prime Minister Modi also met Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy and Boeing's David L Calhoun in Washington, on the third and final day of his visit. He left the States for Egypt at the end of the day, concluding a groundbreaking trip.

"The most important takeaway is the PM's passion for India's development. He does have a specific interest in aviation, in aerospace. It is a big vision," Boeing's CEO Calhoun told ANI in an interview. He emphasized the importance of India playing a significant role not only for the country but also for the broader region broadly in aviation and aerospace.

Amazon CEO Jassy expressed his commitment to generating additional employment opportunities in India after his meeting with Modi. "[We're] very interested in helping create more jobs, helping digitise more small and medium size businesses and helping more Indian companies and products be able to be exported all around the world," said Jassy.

With inputs from ANI