Bharti Airtel and Google on Friday, January 28, 2022, said that they will partner on a long-term, multi-year agreement to accelerate the growth of India’s digital ecosystem, under which Google intends to invest up to USD 1 billion.The amount is part of the USD 10 billion ‘Google for India Digitization Fund’, which was announced by CEO of Google and Alphabet Sundar Pichai in 2020, and will include equity investment as well as a corpus for potential commercial agreements, to be identified and agreed on mutually agreeable terms over the course of the next five years, the companies said in a statement.“Together, they will work to bring best-in-class end-to-end products to serve customer needs, provide quality customer experience, and bring their expertise to solve problems of affordability, access, and digital inclusion,” they added.The deal includes investment of USD 700 million to acquire 1.28% ownership in Airtel and up to USD 300M toward potential multi-year commercial agreements. The partnership will focus on enabling affordable access to smartphones across price ranges, and will continue to explore building on their existing partnerships to potentially co-create India-specific network domain use cases for 5G and other standards, and help accelerate the cloud ecosystem for businesses across India
