Google Cloud’s India leadership change is all about the AI race

Google Cloud has a new person steering its India business, at least for now. Amit Kumar has been appointed interim leader of Google Cloud India, replacing Sashikumar Sreedharan, who is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities.

On the surface, it is another senior technology leadership transition. The timing, however, makes the move considerably more interesting.

India has become one of the most important battlegrounds for the global cloud industry, with Google Cloud competing aggressively against Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services while simultaneously trying to establish itself as a major enterprise AI platform. In that context, the profile of the person taking over matters.

Kumar has been with Google Cloud since March 2021, when he joined as a sales director. For nearly a year, he has led the company’s digital-native business in India, working closely with startups and technology-led companies. Before Google, he spent more than 13 years at Microsoft, followed by a stint at Apple as India country sales manager for enterprise and education. He has also worked with IBM and Tata Telecom.

That background gives Kumar a useful vantage point for what Google Cloud is trying to accomplish next. The cloud market is increasingly becoming an AI infrastructure market. Businesses are moving beyond questions about whether they should experiment with generative AI and towards harder questions around deployment, governance, security, data sovereignty, productivity, and measurable returns.

Kumar has recently spoken about precisely this shift, arguing that the AI conversation is moving from the model itself to the value organisations can extract from it. He has pointed to growing enterprise interest in agentic workflows, where AI systems interact with data, applications, and business processes rather than simply generating text or images. That makes his interim appointment particularly significant.

Google Cloud is already deepening its India infrastructure. It operates cloud regions in Mumbai and Delhi-NCR, and the company has said its India business has grown significantly over the past year, driven partly by increasing adoption of its AI models and integrated AI platform. It is also expanding its Forward-Deployed Engineer organisation in India, putting AI specialists closer to customers to help move projects from pilots into production.

The scale of the larger India bet is even more striking. Google announced a $15-billion investment over five years for an AI hub in Visakhapatnam, comprising data-centre infrastructure, renewable energy capacity, and a subsea gateway. The project is designed to become India’s first gigawatt-scale data-centre campus, with construction having begun in April this year.

Against that backdrop, Kumar’s appointment looks less like a simple change of guard and more like a continuation of Google’s push into India’s next phase of digital growth.

There is also an interesting twist to Sreedharan’s departure. He had taken over as Google Cloud India MD only in July 2025, after previously serving as the company’s APAC COO. He is now joining Indian AI unicorn Sarvam AI as president and chief business officer, according to reports.

That movement itself says something about the market. India’s technology leadership ecosystem is increasingly fluid, with senior executives moving between global technology companies and homegrown AI businesses.

For Google Cloud, the immediate priority is continuity. But the bigger challenge is execution. India is no longer simply a market in which cloud companies sell infrastructure. It is becoming a laboratory for enterprise AI, digital-native businesses, sovereign technology, and large-scale computing.

Kumar’s interim tenure will therefore be watched less for the title attached to it and more for what Google Cloud does next. The real question is whether Google can turn its enormous India investment into equally enormous enterprise adoption. That will require more than infrastructure. It will require customers to put AI into the heart of their businesses. And that is increasingly where the cloud war in India is being fought.