In October 2025, Google said it would spend about $15 billion over five years on an AI hub in Visakhapatnam, the port city on Andhra Pradesh's coast better known as Vizag. At its centre is a gigawatt of data centre capacity spread across three campuses, built with partners from the Adani group and Airtel.
Andhra Pradesh announced the project with a number. When the state's investment board approved it, the project was said to support 1,88,220 direct and indirect jobs each year between 2028 and 2032. Reuters carried the figure. At the foundation stone ceremony in April 2026, the state's IT minister, Nara Lokesh, said the project would create "close to two lakhs" of jobs.
A project of this size also needs paperwork. Before anything is built, the state issues government orders that allot land and set out what incentives a company will receive. For Google's project, the key document is the October 2025 government order approving it, issued to Raiden Infotech, the Indian subsidiary through which Google applied. Google's $15 billion covers the wider AI hub. The order records ₹87,520 crore, roughly $10 billion, proposed for the data centres, and approves incentives capped at ₹22,002 crore.
It does not contain 1,88,220, or any other employment figure for the project. Its title mentions only "the potential to generate significant indirect employment across allied sectors."
That might look like a technicality, except that ten months later the same department approved a data centre of almost exactly the same size. ReNew's approval order, from August 2026, covers a 1,000 MW facility in Anakapalli district, next to Vizag, with a proposed investment of ₹85,200 crore. It closes with "an employment commitment of 1880 jobs within a timeline of 9 (Nine) years and 5 (Five) months."
So one order has a jobs number in it. The other, attached in public to nearly two lakh jobs, has none. Why that matters depends on what 1,88,220 was measuring.
What 1,88,220 counts
The figure was credited to "independent assessments by Access Partnership (2025) and Google's economic modelling". Access Partnership is a policy consultancy. Its estimate counted jobs supported across construction, data centre operations, engineering, IT services and the supply chain.
"Supported" is the important word. An estimate of this kind follows a project's spending outward: to the contractors pouring concrete, to the firms supplying equipment and services, and to the shops where all those workers spend their wages. Each rupee that changes hands becomes a fraction of a job. The result is a model of economic activity, not a list of people anyone plans to hire. We could not find the assessment published, or a state document that carries the number.
Other officials gave other figures. On the day the project was announced, the Union minister of state Pemmasani Chandrasekhar spoke of 5,000 to 6,000 direct jobs and 20,000 to 30,000 in all, DD News reported. The same report repeated the figure of 1.8 lakh.
The companies building the campuses gave a third answer. The land is held by three companies wholly owned by Adani Infra (India), which the orders name as Raiden's authorised partner. Each company had to file an environmental plan before construction, and the environmental management plans for the three campuses list the permanent staff needed once they are running: 575, 650 and 500. That is 1,725 people, or about 1,900 with contract workers. All three plans describe the operating workforce as "nominal".
None of these numbers disproves the others. They answer different questions: how much economic activity the project might support, how many people might work on it directly, and how many will run the buildings once they are finished. A data centre is mostly machines, so the last number is small, while the first counts years of construction and a long chain of suppliers. The trouble starts when all three are simply called "jobs".
If the famous number measures activity rather than hiring, the next question is whether the state asked the project for any employment figure of its own.
What the state writes down elsewhere
In some data centre approvals, it did. From June 2026, the IT department's orders begin to include a numbered "employment commitment". CtrlS committed to 160 jobs for a 100 MW data centre. Data Centre Holdings committed to 1,250 jobs within ten years for 486 MW, and AM AI Factory to 1,000 for 512 MW. ReNew committed to its 1,880.
The practice was not universal. When Sify received land in Vizag in August 2025, its order mentioned only the "potential" to employ 600 people. Reliance's order of May 2026, for a data centre in neighbouring Vizianagaram with a proposed investment of ₹1,08,010 crore, contains no employment number either. Google's order is not the only one without a figure, and the documents do not explain why some orders have one and others do not.
The commitments are also weaker than the word suggests. None of the orders that contain one says what happens if the jobs do not appear. There is no stated penalty and no clause to recover incentives. What a commitment gives the state is a figure in an official document that it can later check against reality.
Google's order has been revisited several times since October 2025. Later orders named the partner companies, enlarged the land from 480 to 601.4 acres, and allowed incentives to move between categories. None of them added an employment number. The orders also refer to a detailed project report from August 2025 that has not been published, so we cannot say whether it sets a target.
That leaves a simple question about the order itself: if it does not count jobs, what does it count?
What the order does count
Almost everything else. The order names three sites and their acreage, discounts the land by 25 per cent, waives stamp duty, and caps a capital subsidy at ₹2,129 crore and refunds of state GST on construction at ₹2,245 crore. Each benefit comes with its own ceiling, and usually its own time period.
The largest share concerns electricity. A discount of ₹1 per unit on power for 15 years is capped at ₹4,800 crore. Exemption from the cross-subsidy surcharge, a charge large consumers usually pay, is capped at ₹4,500 crore over 20 years, and exemption from state transmission charges at ₹4,000 crore. Electricity duty waivers come to ₹1,200 crore, and reimbursement for electrical works to ₹500 crore. Together, about ₹15,000 crore of the ₹22,002 crore ceiling relates to power.
These are limits on what can be paid over two decades, not money already spent. A later order says the power subsidy will be based on what the campuses actually consume.
The order also sets a test for its most valuable benefit. The power discount runs for ten years and is extended for five more upon "achieving the milestones of the proposed investment and proposed capacity." The state will check how much money has been spent and how many megawatts have been built. Employment appears in the order's title, but no milestone is attached to it.
Vizag has seen job commitments before
Employment figures have appeared in Vizag's data centre paperwork before, and they were large. A 2021 order for a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises, covering 130 acres at Madhurawada, recorded "committed direct employment of 24,990" for a 200 MW data centre park. A 2023 order for a second site recorded "direct employment to 14,825 people" alongside a 100 MW data centre.
Those projects also included IT parks and training facilities, so their figures cannot be compared with the staff of a data centre alone. What they show is that the state has written very large job numbers into these documents before. The records we found do not show whether either number was ever measured.
The Google campuses are due to begin operating in July 2028. After that, the companies running them will file accounts showing what they spend on staff, and there will be a real workforce to look at. It may come close to what the environmental plans predict. The wider estimate of 1,88,220 may hold up too.
But 1,88,220 sounds like a count, and it is not one. It is the output of a model, and models produce exact-looking numbers. The order governing up to ₹22,002 crore of public support measures investment, capacity and every rupee of the incentives. When ReNew's campus is running, the state will have a number of its own to hold it to. For Google's project, the best-known figure is one its paperwork never uses.
