Google plants its biggest AI flag outside the US in Vizag — and India's cheapest iPhone slips to spring

Google broke ground this week in Visakhapatnam on what it calls its biggest AI hub outside the US. The commitment is $15 billion over five years, 2026 to 2030, and a 1-gigawatt data centre campus. AdaniConneX runs the physical build. Airtel's Nxtra lays the fibre and the subsea connectivity. Google Cloud supplies the chips, the Gemini models, and the billing. Andhra CM Chandrababu Naidu laid the foundation stone. Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw attended. The scale is real: 1GW is a city's worth of power inside one campus. But look at who owns what. The buildings are Indian. The energy is Indian. The silicon, the model weights, and the pricing power are not. For a decade, India has had the users and the engineers for AI without the compute. This closes the compute gap, on Google's terms. It's a very large deal. It's also, by design, a landlord deal.

Apple supplier Pegatron confirmed during its Q2 2026 earnings presentation what the leakers have been saying for months: only the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will ship this fall. The base iPhone 18, the budget iPhone 18e, and the iPhone Air 2 are pushed to Q1 2027. Reason: a memory chip squeeze that forces Apple to prioritise the components it has for Pro margins. This isn't Apple missing a deadline. It's Apple making the right call — ship what you can at the highest margin, delay what you can't. The hit lands on India though. The 18e was lined up to be the Rs 60-80k volume play, the real replacement cycle driver here. A five-month wait hands the holiday quarter to Samsung's Galaxy S27 and whatever OnePlus ships. Not a crisis. Just a very visible choice about who matters more right now, and the base-model buyer isn't it.

Most Indian households run their digital payments through one person's UPI, because teens, elderly parents, or non-earning adults don't have their own. The usual workaround is sharing passwords, PINs, or whole phones. That is a scam waiting to happen. UPI Circle fixes it. Open BHIM or PhonePe, add a family member to your UPI, and set a monthly limit (NPCI caps it at Rs 15,000 per delegate). Pick partial delegation if you want to approve every payment with your own PIN. Pick full delegation if you want them to transact on their own PIN. Teen needs lunch money? Done. Parent paying the electricity bill? Done. Nobody sees your bank login. The feature's been live for over a year and almost nobody has set it up — mostly because it's buried a layer deep in the menus. Fifteen minutes this weekend and you can finally stop sending your PIN over WhatsApp.

India's top five IT firms added around 14,000 people in Q2 FY27. TCS added 4,258, Infosys added 4,480, Wipro added 888. The hiring freeze everyone talked about is thawing. But look at who's being hired. A TCS fresher in 2015 wrote code. A TCS fresher in 2026 reviews what Copilot wrote, debugs the hallucinations, calls the client when the AI output breaks. Different job. Different ceiling. Different training. The pyramid Indian IT built for two decades — thousands of coders at the base, a few architects at the top — is becoming a diamond. The widest part is now in the middle, where oversight sits. The base rung, where campus hiring used to live, is being automated out. And here is the awkward part. Fresher packages are still Rs 3.5-4 lakh — the same number as 2015. If the job is now oversight, the pay should reflect oversight. It doesn't. Yet.

Three big AI subscriptions. In India today you probably don't need to pay for any of them directly. Perplexity Pro is free for 12 months for every Airtel mobile, broadband, and DTH customer through the Airtel Thanks app. Worth Rs 17,000 a year. Gemini Pro, now powered by Gemini 3, is free for 18 months for Jio Unlimited 5G users through MyJio. Worth Rs 35,100. ChatGPT Plus is Rs 1,999 a month, direct from OpenAI, with no India telecom bundle today. The honest math: if you have an Airtel SIM and a Jio data pack, you're already paying for two of the three biggest AI subscriptions on the planet through your monthly recharge. Only ChatGPT costs extra, and only if you specifically need Projects, Advanced Voice, or the paid image generation limits in one place. Everybody else gets the free lane, which just happens to run through two of your telecom bills.