Google creates $10bn 'digitisation fund' for India

Google has unveiled a plan to invest $10bn in India over the next five to seven years. The plan, which Google is calling its "India Digitisation Fund", will comprise "a mix of equity investments, partnerships, operations, infrastructure, and ecosystem investments" a Google post outlines. The post also makes it plain the …

[DS999]

They want to avoid India becoming another China

And developing their own non-Google solutions to everything and locking them out of grabbing data from another billion people. They're hoping if they make a big splash about investing billions in India it will make their government think twice about supporting "local" software projects that limit their dependence on foreign monopolies, or at least make Google a tacit exception to that policy.

[Anonymous Coward]

As Google is following Microsoft's playbook to the letter ..

.. I would like to know what they extracted in exchange for this.

The right to spy on Indians into perpetuity?

US companies never *give* something without extracting the value of that gift many, many times over.

[Raj]

Both Facebook and Google have invested in the same behemoth entity - Reliance Jio. Half of this Google digitization fund goes into investment in Jio. Facebook and Google have both invested near identical $5 billion sums into Jio, which gives them under 10% each. Both made investments after Mukesh Ambani (net worth approx $75 billion) who owns the Jio platform, put a 20% stake on the block in spring 2020.

It doesn't get them much by way of control, but they're simply responding to the reality that Jio is THE big dog of Indian mobile data, and if they have no stake in it, they lose. With <10% stakes each, they just ensure they each have a stake in a mobile market with 1.1 billion subscribers, but neither are strong enough to demand anything from Ambani.