Google lines up collaborations, pledges funding for AI push in healthcare, agriculture

New Delhi: Google on Tuesday announced funding support of $8 million to India's AI Centers of Excellence for health, agriculture, education, and sustainable cities, and committed $4,00,000 to support development of India's health foundation model.

Google - - the architect of AI models, including Gemini and Gemma that are integrated for search enhancements, cloud services, and enterprise tools - - is also supporting Gnani.AI, CoRover.AI, and BharatGen with $50,000 grants each for building models serving Indic language solutions.

Google said it is providing Wadhwani AI with $4.5 million in funding to support multilingual AI-powered applications for health and agriculture, according to a release.

The announcements mark a slew of new collaborations and funding commitments by Google to bolster India's AI ecosystem, the company said.

"Google announced funding of $4,00,000 to support new collaborations that will leverage 'MedGemma' to build India's Health Foundation Models," the company said in a release.

Such models aim to raise the efficiency of healthcare providers and improve patient outcomes across India.

Google said Ajna Lens will work with experts from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to build models that will support India-specific use cases in Dermatology and OPD Triaging.

The resulting models, it said, will contribute to India's Digital Public Infrastructure and their outcomes will be made accessible to the ecosystem.

Additionally, researchers, AI experts, and clinicians from IISc will explore using AI models for broader clinical applications.

To push its inclusive AI agenda, Google announced a $2 million founding contribution to establish the new Indic Language Technologies Research Hub at IIT Bombay. The initiative aims to ensure global advancements serve India's linguistic diversity, Google said.