They Called It “AI City Vizag.” Nobody Asked Vizag.

Every time my family visited the Simhachalam temple, we'd pass Mudasarlova Reservoir on the way up. It was just part of the route — the water sitting still in the morning, and the Kambalakonda hills rising behind it. I never thought of it as something that needed protecting. It just existed, the way the city itself existed.

It doesn't just exist anymore.

On May 18, 2026, a team of activists visited the Kailasgiri forest on the edge of Visakhapatnam — part of the Simhachalam hill range, right next to the Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary. What they found should have been front-page news: trees being felled, hillsides being cut open, the landscape already altered.

No public hearing had been held. No central environmental clearance had been granted. The machines had simply moved in.

This is Google's $15 billion AI hub in Vizag. And I say that as a CS student who genuinely wants India to lead in AI — which is exactly why I can't stay quiet about how we're doing it.

The Pitch The scale is real and it's staggering. Google, in partnering with AdaniConneX and Airtel's Nxtra, is building a 1-gigawatt AI data center campus across three sites — Adavivaram, Tarluvada, and Rambilli — eventually targeting 5 GW. That's more than three times India's entire data center capacity as of last year. Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu laid the foundation stone on April 28. The state branded it "AI City Vizag." They promised 1.88 lakh jobs. They promised Andhra Pradesh's redemption after losing Hyderabad in the 2014 bifurcation.

I understand the hunger. I really do.

What I don't understand is why that hunger meant abandoning every legal safeguard the people of this city have.

The Forest One of the three campuses sits on land that occupies 90% of the Pedda Chuuka Konda Reserved Forest. It is 1.53 km from the Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary — a zone that the central government officially designated as ecologically sensitive in 2017. HRF's full letter to MoEFCC — Countercurrents, May 2026

Under India's own EIA Notification of 2006, any project this close to a protected wildlife area is automatically a Category A project — meaning it requires central government appraisal, an independent Environmental Impact Assessment, and mandatory public hearings where affected communities can object.

None of that happened.

The AP State Environment Impact Assessment Authority classified the projects as Category B — keeping approvals within state control, eliminating public hearings, and cutting the timeline to days. The clearances were issued just before the April 28 ceremony. The state government even issued an order on April 17 promising to "facilitate" wildlife sanctuary clearances after the fact — essentially pledging to arrange permissions for protected land that construction had already begun on. The News Minute's investigation into rushed environmental clearances — April 28, 2026

By the time anyone filed a formal objection, the trees were already coming down.

The Water Here is the part that should worry every single person in Vizag, not just environmentalists.

The Adavivaram campus sits within the southern catchment area of Mudasarlova Reservoir — one of the city's primary drinking water sources. The same reservoir that dried up completely in 2019, forcing the GVMC to pull emergency water from the Yeleru canal.

Data centers are not light users of water. A 100 MW facility requires roughly 2 million litres of water per day for cooling — enough for 6,500 households. The Vizag hub is being built at 1,000 MW.

Construction activity on the catchment hillsides will block the streams that feed Mudasarlova. The diesel storage and generator systems will introduce long-term contamination risks. Google consumed over 5 billion gallons of water across all its global data centers in 2023–31% from watersheds already classified as water-scarce. Mongabay India on water and energy concerns — May 2026

The AP government has not released a single public estimate of how much freshwater the Vizag centers will consume annually. Not one number. The city that will bear the water cost has been told nothing.

The People In Adavivaram and Mudasarlova villages, families who have farmed this land for generations are being displaced. They will receive compensation. What they will not receive is their community — once you're scattered, it is scattered. They were never consulted. The mandatory public hearing that would have given them a legal voice was the first thing the government eliminated when it downgraded the project's category.

Meanwhile, the Union Budget 2026 announced a tax holiday until 2047 for foreign cloud service providers using Indian data center infrastructure. citizens subsidize the land, the water, the power, and the tax breaks. The villages lose their homes. Google and Adani keep the returns.

What I Actually Want I want India to build world-class AI infrastructure. I want Vizag to be a technology hub. I want the jobs, the research ecosystem, the digital sovereignty that this kind of investment could genuinely unlock.

But a $15 billion project affecting protected forests, a wildlife sanctuary, a city's drinking water source, and generations of farming families cannot be approved in days to meet a ribbon-cutting deadline. That's not development. That's a government cosplaying as a corporate facilitator while calling it a jobs program.

The legal asks are not radical: revoke the flawed clearances, resubmit for proper Category A appraisal, hold actual public hearings in the affected villages, and release transparent water consumption data before a single more tree falls.

None of this kills the project. Google isn't leaving over a proper EIA, anyway.

Vizag is one of the most beautiful cities in India. The bay, the hills, the forests on the edge of the city — they are not a backdrop. They are the city.

"AI City Vizag" was coined in a boardroom. The people of Adavivaram didn't get to name it. And until they do — until the process is done right — the only honest thing to call this project is what it currently is… a $15 billion shortcut taken at the public's expense.

CS student from Vizag.