Google’s Data Centre in India, Largest Outside US, ‘Failed to Disclose’ Water Consumption Plans ?

Andhra Pradesh has launched a proposed ₹1.35 lakh crore Google Cloud AI Hub in Visakhapatnam, positioning it as one of India’s largest AI and digital infrastructure projects, ET reported. Spread over 600 acres, the 1-gigawatt facility aims to transform Vizag into AI hub, says the newspaper.

Adani group has also committed $100 billion to build Adani-Google-Airtel data centre project, ET report said.

Mongabay said Google has “failed to disclose” details about its water consumption plans while experts question how much of the “1GW AI hub” would be powered by renewable energy.

Activists and lawyers assert that data centres should be classified as separate infrastructure projects with massive resource needs, for obtaining environment clearance. Experts call for a clear, defined national data centre policy. After a draft policy was launched by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India (MeitY) in 2020, there have been no updates or a final policy yet, the report said. 

Meanwhile, Reliance Industries Ltd. is also planning to build a 1.5 gigawatt (GW) data centre cluster, also in Vizag. AP aims to create 6.5 GW of compute capacity in the coming years.

The report explained that :”Data centres use water, primarily for cooling the systems. Google alone consumed approximately 31 billion litres of water across all its data centres in 2024. While the company reports that a majority of its freshwater withdrawals came from sources at low risk of water depletion, further information on said sources was not provided. It also states that it’s planning integrated watershed management to address existing hydrological stress. However, Visakhapatnam district has the lowest levels of groundwater available for domestic, agricultural or industrial use in the state (2.12 TMC), as on April 1, 2026.”.

The environmental clearance (EC) issued to M/s. Vizag Mega Data Centre Park Limited for the 1000 megawatt (1 GW) data centre park in Tarluvada, accessed by Mongabay-India, does not disclose information about the water usage during the operation phase. Emails to Google with questions about their water consumption plans in AP were unanswered at the time of publishing this story.

The environmental clearance (EC) issued to M/s. Vizag Mega Data Centre Park Limited for the 1000 megawatt (1 GW) data centre park in Tarluvada, accessed by Mongabay-India, does not disclose information about the water usage during the operation phase. Emails to Google with questions about their water consumption plans in AP were unanswered at the time of publishing this story.

India's Markets Regulator Sets up Task Force to Tackle AI-Driven Cyber Threats

Market watchdog the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has warned about the threat of AI fraud posed to financial products and systems from the very AI tools they use to detect weaknesses, tools similar to “Mythos” reported Moneycontrol.  

Sebi will soon release advisory for regulated financial entities about dangers linked to AI models and AI-led risk detection systems, as a part of the regulator’s growing focus on technology-driven threats in financial markets.

The news outlet said “while innovation like digital onboarding, faster settlement, direct payout, online bond platforms, REITs, INVITs, AIFs, municipal bonds, green bonds, commodity derivatives show how products and processes can deepen markets, widen access, and improve risk management, innovation also brings risks.”

Australia Regulator Calls for Urgent Cybersecurity Action to Counter Mythos

Australia's corporate regulator ⁠has ⁠urged the country's financial sector ⁠to take urgent action on tackling potential cyber risks from frontier AI systems such as Mythos, Reuters reported. 

The news wire said that risks posed by Mythos, which has high-level coding capabilities, have given it a potentially unprecedented ⁠ability to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, experts have warned.

Anthropic, which developed Mythos, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on ASIC's letter, the outlet pointed out.

The ASIC warning follows Australia's banking regulator last month saying the domestic financial services industry's information security practices were struggling ⁠to match the rate of change in AI.

Anthropic has launched Claude Mythos Preview under Project Glasswing, a tightly restricted access programme that includes major technology firms such as Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple.

$1bn Ocean Data Centre Start-up Powered by Waves

Palantir is investing in a US start-up Panthalassa. The company received a $1.4bn investment and it plans to use wave energy to fuel “giant fleets of floating data centres”, FT reported. Panthalassa has spent a decade developing ocean energy technology, which uses the motion of the waves to force water through a turbine to produce electricity.  

Peter Thiel, co-founder Palantir and PayPal invested in Panthalassa. Palantir has been in news for its controversial AI driven weapons technology that  powers Trump’s anti-immigrants ICE force and used in the war against Gaza. Its investment in floating data centres would allow the company to scale up a pilot manufacturing facility, ahead of starting commercial deployments next year.

EU Countries, Lawmakers Clinch Provisional Deal on Watered-down AI Rules

EU countries agreed to watered-down landmark artificial ‌intelligence rules and delay their implementation, “caving in to Big Tech”, Reuters reported. 

Today, the AI Act significantly supports companies by “reducing recurring administrative costs," Marilena Raouna, Cyprus's deputy minister for European affairs, said in a statement. 

The changes to the ⁠AI Act, are part of a simplification drive that came after businesses complained about overlapping regulations and red tape hampering their ability to compete with U.S. and Asian rivals.

The EU agreed to delay rules on high-risk AI systems such as those involving biometrics or related to critical infrastructure and law enforcement from this year to December 2, 2027.

However, mandatory watermarking of AI-generated output will apply from December 2. There was agreement too on a ban ‌on AI ⁠practices that create unauthorised sexually explicit images, a move responding to such content generated by Elon Musk's xAI chatbot Grok on X and sexually intimate deepfakes produced by Grok. The ban will apply from December 2.

China Exports More EVs Than Traditional Cars for First Time in April

China exported more new energy vehicles (NEVs) than internal combustion engine vehicles for the first time in April, as car makers expanded overseas to “offset subdued domestic demand”, the Wall Street Journal reported citing data from the China Passenger Car Association, saying that NEVs accounted for 52.7% of China’s total auto exports in April, doubling to 406,000 units. Bloomberg reported that China’s auto sales fell 21.5% to 1.4m, the lowest figure since 2022, as NEV sales were not “strong enough to counter the slump” in traditional vehicles. The outlet adds that NEV sales fell 6.8%, indicating that a “potential boost” from rising oil prices could not “reverse domestic softness” due to the “rollback of trade-in subsidies and the return of a purchasing tax on EVs”.Reuters reported that the US auto industry are calling on Donald Trump (scheduled to visit China this week) not to offer China “any access” to the US auto market.