Google to invest $1 bn in Bharti Airtel as part of its India Digitisation Fund

Telco behemoth Bharti Airtel and US-based search engine Google have inked a long-term, multi-year agreement to aid the growth of India’s digital ecosystem. As part of this partnership, Google plans to invest $1 billion as part of its Google for India Digitisation Fund. The deal includes investment of $700 million to acquire 1.28 per cent ownership in Airtel and up to $300 million towards implementing commercial agreements.   These commercial agreements will include investments in scaling Airtel’s offerings that covers a range of Android-enabled devices to customers via innovative affordability programs and other offerings aimed at accelerating access and digital inclusion across India’s digital ecosystem. Google and Airtel will also continue to build on their existing partnerships to potentially co-create India-specific network domain use cases for 5G and other standards and accelerating the cloud ecosystem for businesses across India.   Both the companies will also potentially co-create India-specific network domain use cases for 5G and other standards, with cutting-edge implementations. Airtel is already utilising Google’s 5G-ready evolved packet core and software defined network platforms. The telco major also plans to explore the scaling up of deployment of Google’s network virtualisation solutions to deliver a superior network experience to their customers.   “Our commercial and equity investment in Airtel is a continuation of our Google for India Digitisation Fund’s efforts to increase access to smartphones, enhance connectivity to support new business models, and help companies on their digital transformation journey,” says CEO of Google and Alphabet Sundar Pichai on the Google-Airtel partnership.

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