Compass Investments

Alphabet Inc. has reserved 2.4 million square feet of office space in Bangalore.

Trump’s $100,000 fee for H-1B visas is encouraging IT firms to hire more outside the US.

India has become a key recruiting location for major U.S. tech companies.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is gearing up for expansion in India, leasing space that could potentially accommodate tens of thousands of professionals in the country’s tech stronghold.

the Silicon Valley-based IT giant has signed a deal for one office tower and secured options for two more in the Alembic City complex located in Bangalore’s Whitefield tech zone, according to sources close to the deal. The three properties have a total area of 2.4 million square feet. The first building is scheduled to start occupancy in the coming months, while the remaining two will be ready by 2026.

Real estate options give prospective tenants the exclusive right to lease or purchase a property at a predetermined price for a certain period of time. However, Alphabet will not necessarily exercise the right to two additional towers.

If the company occupies all three buildings, it could employ up to 20,000 people, which would more than exceed Alphabet’s current workforce in India (about 14,000 of its 190,000 employees worldwide), said knowledgeable sources who requested anonymity because the plans are not yet public.

In response to an inquiry, Alphabet confirmed the availability of large office centers in a number of Indian cities, including Bangalore. A company spokesperson clarified by mail that “only one tower” with 650000 square feet of space has been leased. The spokesman declined to comment on the prospect of additional buildings and did not give an exact number of Indian employees.

The expansion comes as tougher immigration policies under President Donald Trump have made it harder to attract overseas workers to the U.S., forcing IT companies to look more aggressively overseas for staff. India has emerged as a critical market for US firms to find talent, especially amid increased competition in the AI space.

Google competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC have also recently opened offices here. In January, Anthropic hired a former top executive from Microsoft Corp. Irina Gose to head its India operations. Gose said at the time that India has a real chance to shape the trajectory of AI development and adoption on a national scale.

For US IT giants, India is a way to get around Washington’s strict immigration norms. The Trump administration intends to raise the fee for H-1B work visas to $100,000 per application, making it much harder to hire Indian engineers to work in the US.

These changes are fueling the growth of so-called global centers of competence – technology units run by multinational corporations from sectors ranging from software and retail to finance. Many of these centers are now focused on developing AI systems and products. Nasscom, India’s industry body, predicts that these centers will employ 2.5 million people by 2030 (up from 1.9 million today).

Last year, the company opened its largest campus in Bangalore, complete with indoor miniature golf, pickleball courts and a masala chai cafeteria.

Google has since posted hundreds of engineering jobs in the city, from AI directors in its cloud division to chip designers and machine learning specialists (many of whom require a PhD). YouTube, Google’s video service, is looking for engineers to build generative AI tools.

For AI companies like Alphabet, it’s not just the talent pool that makes India attractive. Tens of millions of new users make their first online activation every year, becoming potential customers for chatbots and AI assistants, as well as users of new AI-based coding tools.