U.S. big tech companies such as Google’s parent company Alphabet, OpenAI, and Amazon are heading to the Global South (emerging countries in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa located in the southern hemisphere) with excellent manpower and young markets. While the U.S. has made large-scale job cuts, the Global South is expanding its organization and recruitment. The availability of high-quality IT personnel at low labor costs and the Donald Trump administration’s immigration policy have made it difficult to supply and demand talent in the U.S. are also seen as one of the reasons behind accelerating Big Tech’s advance into the Global South. Bloomberg reported on the 4th (local time) that Google’s parent company Alphabet ran to India. Alphabet leased one office tower and signed a contract for two more buildings at the “Alembic City” development complex in the Whitefield Technology District of Bengaluru, India’s technology hub. According to Bloomberg, the total size of the contract is about 221,488 square meters. Employees will move into one building within a few months to start work, and the other two are scheduled to be completed in 2027. If all three buildings are used, up to 20,000 people will be able to work here. “This means that Alphabet can more than double its business in India,” Bloomberg said.
Analysts say that Alphabet is expanding its workplaces in India because it is difficult to bring foreign talents to the U.S. due to the Trump administration’s visa restrictions. The Trump administration has decided to drastically raise fees for professional work visas (H-1B) and charge up to 100,000 dollars per application. As a result, U.S. companies have become increasingly burdened with bringing their overseas engineers to the U.S. by paying high visa costs, the company has started to hire more IT workers there.
India, the representative country of the Global South, is an attractive alternative. It is a country that produces a lot of talented young IT workers but still maintains low wages. According to Xpeno, a labor consulting firm, U.S. big tech companies including Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and Google hired 32,000 new employees in India alone last year, increasing the number of employees in India to 214,000. During the same period, these companies were estimated to have cut about 127,000 jobs in the United States.
India, which has overtaken China as the No. 1 population among big tech companies focused on artificial intelligence (AI) models, is also an important foothold in the competition for AI leadership. According to an analysis report on the ChatGPT app by Sensor Tower, an app market research firm, India was the No. 1 user of ChatGPT in November last year. Downloads of ChatGPT in India accounted for 15.7 percent of all downloads. OpenAI was the first country to release a cheaper version of ChatGPT Go in India to meet the needs of Indian users. It is also attracting Indian users without incurring fees for the ChatGPT version for the first year.
Anthropic also announced that it will open a local office in Bengaluru from this year and participate in the construction of an AI ecosystem led by the Indian government. Amazon also became a major foreign investor in India at the end of last year, announcing its plan to invest $35 billion in the Indian AI and cloud sectors by 2030.
SAM KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
