Google’s Initiative to Showcase India’s Research Impact: Driving Global AI Leadership in Healthcare, Agriculture, and Sustainability

Google has announced a suite of new collaborations and funding commitments to bolster India’s AI ecosystem. The company has committed $400,000 to support the development of India’s Health Foundation model, and $8 million to India’s AI Centers of Excellence for health, agriculture, education, and sustainable cities. Additionally, Google is providing $50,000 grants to startups Gnani.AI, CoRover.AI, and BharatGen to build models serving Indic language solutions.

NEW DELHI: Google today announced a suite of new collaborations and funding commitments to bolster India’s AI ecosystem at its “Lab to Impact” dialogue, an event supported by the India AI Impact Summit 2026. Attended by Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, Union Minister of Education, the dialogue highlighted Google’s research-driven approach to supporting Digital Public Infrastructure and empowering the research, developer, and startup ecosystem to solve national challenges and meet large-scale social needs.

Minister of Education, Government of India, Shri Dharmendra Pradhan stated: “India is approaching artificial intelligence as a strategic national capability, not as a short-term technology trend. The four AI Centres of Excellence have been conceived as a coordinated national research mission, advancing foundational research, responsible AI, and applied solutions that serve public purpose, and contributing to our larger aspiration of Viksit Bharat 2047. Building a globally competitive AI ecosystem requires not only public investment, but also strong institutional leadership and long-term partnerships with industry. This effort is supported by Google and Google.org through their USD 8 million contribution to the AI Centres of Excellence and a USD 2 million founding contribution to the Indic Language Technologies Research Hub at IIT Bombay.”

Speaking at the event, Dr Manish Gupta, Senior Research Director, Google DeepMind, stated: “AI is humanity’s most profound and powerful force for progress, and at Google, we see its global evolution driven by three pivotal shifts – its ability to accelerate scientific discovery, its advances augmenting human capability, and India’s unique embrace of AI’s potential. From foundational research to ecosystem deployment to scaled impact, our full-stack approach is equipping the country to lead a global AI-powered future, with innovations from India’s labs benefiting billions across the world.”

Google announced funding of $400,000 to support new collaborations that will leverage MedGemma to build India’s Health Foundation Models. These models aim to improve the efficiency of healthcare providers and improve patient outcomes across India. As a first step, Ajna Lens will work with experts from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to build models that will support India-specific use cases in Dermatology and OPD Triaging.

Google is also working with the National Health Authority (NHA) to deploy its advanced AI to convert millions of fragmented, unstructured medical records into the international, machine-readable FHIR standard. This shift is expected to help patients understand their medical information better, reduce documentation burden on patients and hospitals, and inform better data-driven policy decisions for India’s public healthcare strategy.

• Commits $400,000 to support the development of India’s Health Foundation model
• Announces funding support of $8 million to India’s AI Centers of Excellence for health, agriculture, education, and sustainable cities
• Supports Gnani.AI, CoRover.AI, and BharatGen with $50,000 grants each for building models serving Indic language solutions
• Provides Wadhwani AI with $4.5 million in funding to support multilingual AI-powered applications for health and agriculture
• Partners with ReNew Energy to support a new 150 MW solar project in Rajasthan and reduce emissions across the value chain

Google has consistently supported India’s scientists and researchers in fostering the country’s innovation. Over the last five years, Google has supported nearly 1,000 years of PhD-level research work across more than 25 leading research institutions, including premier institutes.

To further support India’s research ecosystem, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, is announcing funding support totaling $8 million for four AI Centres of Excellence established by the Government of India, aligning with the vision to “Make AI in India and Make AI work for India. This funding will support research at the Centers of Excellence:

• TANUH at IISc Bangalore will focus on developing scalable AI solutions for the effective treatment of non-communicable diseases.
• Airawat Research Foundation, IIT Kanpur, will focus on pioneering research on AI to transform urban governance.
• AI Centre of Excellence for Education, IIT Madras, will focus on developing solutions to enhance learning and teaching outcomes.
• ANNAM.AI at IIT Ropar will focus on developing data-driven solutions for agriculture and farmer welfare.

Google is also providing $2 million in Google.org funding to support Wadhwani AI in piloting HealthVaani, an LLM-based conversational AI assistant. Launched in partnership with the Ministries of Health and Family Welfare and Women and Child Development, HealthVaani supports ASHA and Anganwadi workers.

Google is committed to ensuring the scaled impact of AI is responsible and sustainable, demonstrated by a partnership with ReNew Energy to support a new 150 megawatt (MW) solar project in Rajasthan, India. Under a long-term agreement, Google will receive environmental attribute certificates (EACs) and allocate them to its value chain emissions.