Tech
India offers zero taxes through 2047 to lure global AI workloads
As the global race to build AI infrastructure accelerates, India has offered foreign cloud providers zero taxes through 2047 on services sold outside the country if they run those workloads from Indian data centers — a bid to attract the next wave of AI computing investment, even as power shortages and water stress threaten expansion in the South Asian nation.
On Sunday, India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced (PDF) the proposal in the country’s annual budget, offering a tax holiday — effectively zero taxes — on revenues from cloud services sold outside India if those services are run from data centers in the country. Sales to Indian customers would have to be routed through locally incorporated resellers and taxed domestically, she told parliament. The budget also proposes a 15% cost-plus safe harbour for Indian data-center operators providing services to related foreign entities.
The announcement comes as U.S. cloud giants including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft race to add data-center capacity worldwide to support the surge in artificial-intelligence workloads, with India emerging as an increasingly attractive location for new investment. The country offers a large pool of engineering talent and growing demand for cloud services, and has positioned itself as a key alternative to the U.S., Europe, and parts of Asia for expanding compute infrastructure.
In October, Google said it would invest $15 billion to build an AI hub and expand data-center infrastructure in India, its largest commitment in the country to date, following a $10 billion commitment in 2020. Microsoft followed in December with plans to invest $17.5 billion by 2029 to expand its AI and cloud footprint, funding new data centers, infrastructure, and training programs. Amazon has also stepped up its spending in December, saying it would invest an additional $35 billion in India by 2030, taking its total planned commitment to about $75 billion as it expands its retail and cloud operations.
India’s domestic data-center sector is also ramping up to meet global demand. In November, Digital Connexion, a joint venture backed by Reliance Industries, Brookfield Asset Management, and Digital Realty Trust, said it would invest $11 billion by 2030 to develop a 1-gigawatt, AI-focused data center campus in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. The project, spanning about 400 acres in Visakhapatnam, is among the largest announced in India and underscores growing interest from both domestic and global investors in building AI-ready infrastructure in the country. Separately, Adani Group said in December it plans to invest up to $5 billion alongside Google in its AI data center project in the country.
However, scaling up data center capacity in India may prove difficult, as patchy power availability, high electricity costs, and water scarcity pose key constraints for energy-intensive AI workloads. Those challenges could slow construction and raise operating costs for cloud providers.
“The announcements on data centers signal that they are being treated as a strategic business sector rather than just back-end infrastructure,” said Rohit Kumar, founding partner of New Delhi-based The Quantum Hub, a public policy and tech consulting firm. The push is likely to attract more private investment and strengthen India’s position as a regional data and compute hub, though execution challenges around power availability, land access, and state-level clearances remain, he added.
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Sagar Vishnoi, co-founder and director of Noida-based think tank Future Shift Labs, said India’s data-center power capacity is projected to surpass 2 gigawatts by 2026, up from just over 1 gigawatt currently, and could expand more than fivefold to exceed 8 gigawatts by 2030, driven by capital investments of more than $30 billion. While the budget signals clear intent to accelerate digital infrastructure and cloud computing, Vishnoi said allowing foreign cloud firms to earn profits tax-free until 2047 reflects a “strategic bet on global Big Tech,” even as India could produce its own technology champions over the next two decades.
He added that routing services to Indian users through reseller entities could leave smaller domestic players competing for thin margins, rather than receiving comparable upstream incentives.
The federal budget also stepped up incentives to deepen India’s role in electronics and semiconductor manufacturing, as the country seeks to move beyond assembly and capture more value in global supply chains. The federal government would launch a second phase of the India Semiconductor Mission, the finance minister said, focused on producing equipment and materials, developing full-stack domestic chip intellectual property, and strengthening supply chains, while backing industry-led research and training centers to build a skilled workforce.
Additionally, the Indian government has raised the outlay for the Electronics Components Manufacturing Scheme to ₹400 billion (around $4.36 billion), from ₹229.19 billion (about $2.50 billion), after the program — launched in April 2025 — attracted investment commitments at more than double its original target, Sitharaman said.
This scheme offers incentives tied to incremental production and investment, reimbursing a portion of costs for companies that manufacture key components such as printed circuit boards, camera modules, connectors, and other parts used in smartphones, servers, and data-center hardware. By linking payouts to actual output rather than upfront subsidies, the program is designed to draw global suppliers deeper into India’s electronics supply chain and reduce reliance on imported components — a long-standing criticism of the country’s manufacturing push.
Alongside increasing the spending allocation for the electronics components scheme, the federal budget also proposed a five-year tax exemption starting in April for foreign companies supplying equipment and tooling to electronics toll manufacturers operating in bonded zones. The change is likely to benefit companies including Apple, which relies heavily on contract manufacturing in India and has previously been reported to have sought clarity from New Delhi on the tax treatment of high-end iPhone production equipment supplied to its partners.
The budget also sought to address vulnerabilities in critical minerals, as India grapples with tightening global supplies of rare earth materials used in electric vehicles, electronics devices, and defense systems. The finance minister said the federal government would support mineral-rich states including Odisha, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu in establishing dedicated rare-earth corridors to promote mining, processing, research, and manufacturing. The move builds on a seven-year incentive program approved in late 2025 to boost domestic production of rare-earth magnets, as access to supplies from China — which dominates global output — has become more constrained.
Beyond AI infrastructure and electronics manufacturing, the Indian government also moved to boost cross-border e-commerce, aiming to help smaller businesses tap global demand. The finance minister said the existing ₹1 million (around $11,000) value cap per consignment on courier exports would be removed, a move expected to benefit small manufacturers, artisans, and startups selling overseas through online platforms. The federal government would streamline the handling of rejected and returned shipments using technology, addressing a long-standing bottleneck for exporters, Sitharaman said.
Overall, the latest measures emphasize India’s ambition to position itself as a long-term hub for global technology infrastructure, spanning cloud computing, electronics manufacturing, and critical minerals. The strategy aims to capitalize on surging AI demand and shifting supply chains. Nonetheless, its success will hinge on execution — from reliable power and water for data centers to sustained support for domestic innovation — as global companies and investors weigh whether India can translate policy incentives into durable leadership in the AI era.
Tech
Exclusive: Google deepens Thinking Machines Lab ties with new multi-billion-dollar deal
Former OpenAI executive Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has signed a new multi-billion-dollar agreement to expand its use of Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure, including systems powered by Nvidia’s latest GPUs, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The deal is valued in the single-digit billions, according to a source familiar with the matter, and includes access to Google’s latest AI systems built atop Nvidia’s new GB300 chips, alongside infrastructure services to support model training and deployment.
Google has been actively striking a number of cloud deals with AI developers as it aims to wrap together its AI computing offerings with other cloud services like storage, a Kubernetes engine, and Spanner, its database product. Earlier this month, Anthropic signed an agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of tensor processing unit (TPUs) capacity (these are Google’s custom-designed AI chips for machine learning workloads).
But the competition is fierce. Just this week, Anthropic also signed a new agreement with Amazon to secure up to 5 gigawatts of capacity for training and deploying Claude.
Earlier this year, Thinking Machines partnered with Nvidia in a deal that included an investment from the chipmaker. But this is the first time the lab has struck a deal with a cloud services provider. The deal is not exclusive, so Thinking Machines may use multiple cloud providers over time, but it’s still a sign that Google is looking to lock in fast-growing frontier labs early.
Murati left her job as OpenAI’s chief technologist and founded Thinking Machines in February 2025. The company, which soon afterwards raised a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation, has remained highly secretive, but launched its first product in October. Dubbed Tinker, it’s a tool that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models.
Wednesday’s deal provided some insight into what Thinking Machines is developing. In a press release, Google noted that it can support the startup’s reinforcement learning workloads, which Tinker’s architecture relies on. Reinforcement learning is a training approach that has underpinned recent breakthroughs at labs, including DeepMind and OpenAI, and the scale of the Google Cloud deal reflects how computationally expensive that work can get.
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Thinking Machines is among the first Google Cloud customers to access its GB300-powered systems, which offer a 2X improvement in training and serving speed compared to prior-generation GPUs, per Google.
“Google Cloud got us running at record speed with the reliability we demand,” Myle Ott, a founding researcher at Thinking Machines, said in a statement.
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Tech
The most interesting startups showcased at Google Cloud Next 2026
Google Cloud Next is taking place this week in Las Vegas, and one clear message has emerged: Google wants AI startups on its cloud. To that end, it made several startup-related announcements.
The most significant is that the tech giant has earmarked a new $750 million budget to help its Cloud partners sell more AI agents to enterprises. This funding is available to partners ranging from startups to the big consulting firms. It can be used for costs like Gemini proof-of-concept projects, Google forward-deployed engineers, cloud credits, and deployment rebates.
Google also highlighted a long list of startups that are using Google Cloud, either newly signed or expanding their footprint. Among them are a few standout names:
Lovable is expanding its use of Google Cloud by launching a new coding agent through Google’s enterprise app marketplace. Lovable is the fast-growing vibe coding startup and was on a $400 million ARR track as of February, it said.
Notion, Silicon Valley’s favorite AI-infused document productivity app, most recently valued at about $11 billion, is using Gemini models to power its text and image generation features.
Gamma, an AI-powered PowerPoint killer recently valued at a $2.1 billion valuation, is using Google’s state-of-the-art image model Nano Banana 2 and other Google Cloud features.
Inferact, the commercial inference startup from the creators of the popular open-source project vLLM, is accessing Nvidia’s GPUs through Google Cloud, in addition to using the tech giant’s AI stack.
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ComfyUI, the popular open-source tool for creating AI-generated images and multimedia, also offers access to Nano Banana 2 and is using other Cloud features.
Other startups that received the Google Cloud shout-out this year include:
ChorusView, which makes AI-powered smart tags that track the condition and movement of goods in real time.
Emergent AI, a vibe coding platform.
ExaCare AI, which makes AI software for post-acute medical care facilities.
Insilica, which creates AI-generated regulatory-compliant chemical safety reports.
Optii, which makes AI-enhanced hotel operations software.
Parallel AI, which builds web search and research APIs built for AI agents.
Proximal Health, which makes AI-powered software that automates the insurance claims adjudication process.
Reducto, which does AI-powered document parsing.
Stord, which handles e-commerce fulfillment and parcel operations.
Stylitics, which makes AI image generation software for retailers for tasks like outfit styling and product bundles.
Temporal, a developer cloud environment built to prevent failures.
Vapi, which makes dev tools for building conversational voice agents.
Vurvey Labs, which conducts synthetic market research via AI agents.
Wand, an in-game assistant for single-player PC games.
Watershed, which makes software that helps enterprises report on and manage sustainability programs.
ZenBusiness, an all-in-one back-office tool for small businesses that includes an AI chat assistant.
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Tech
Duolingo is now giving free users access to advanced learning content
Duolingo announced on Wednesday that its advanced language learning content is now available for free across nine languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Users can access this content through the web, iOS, and Android devices.
This advanced content is at the B2 level on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which is the international standard for language skills that schools and employers recognize. B2 level content refers to learning materials without translations, complex scenarios, and specialized vocabulary.
The new offering will include features like “Advanced Stories,” which helps with reading comprehension, and DuoRadio, a podcast-like audio experience for listening comprehension.
Now that Duolingo users can tap into this advanced learning content for free, they can level up their skills, whether that’s practicing for job interviews, prepping for studying abroad, or tackling complex news articles, films, and books without relying on translations.
The company says this positions it as the only free app to offer advanced-level learning across these nine languages at no cost. While competitors like Babbel and Busuu offer advanced courses, they typically require paid subscriptions. For instance, Busuu has some CEFR-aligned courses up to the B2 level, but the free version is pretty limited and doesn’t offer lessons like grammar explanations, so users need to pay for full access.
Previously, Duolingo only provided free courses that capped at A2 or B1 levels, mainly focusing on basic communication skills.
The company is positioning this free advanced learning offering as an enticing opportunity for job seekers, framing language learning as a practical pathway to improving employability in an increasingly global workforce.
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This comes at a time when the job market remains highly competitive and overall growth has slowed. Research from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages shows that learning a second language can raise someone’s employability by as much as 50%.
“Reaching job-ready proficiency in a new language used to be out of reach for most people,” Bozena Pajak, head of learning science at Duolingo, said in a statement. “It took years of expensive classes or immersive experiences that not everyone could access.”
Duolingo’s decision to offer advanced learning for free is also a strategy to increase its free user base. In its Q4 earnings report, the company stated that it has 52.7 million daily active users, demonstrating 30% growth compared to the previous year. This number is higher than its paid subscriber base, which stands at 12.2 million. However, Duolingo’s shares fell after the company projected that the year-over-year bookings growth rate for Q2 2026 is expected to experience a slight decline.
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