The World Economic Forum meet at Davos is increasingly becoming a serious annual affair for the two Telugu states of late. The Chief Ministers of both states are not only attending the event to attract investments, but also getting innovative about what they could make out of the meeting of global investors and leaders.
This year, Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy launched the Telangana AI Innovation Hub (TAIH) on January 20 at the WEF meet. TAIH is supposed to be a “world testing ground” for AI products and ideas. The entrepreneurs would be offered real-time testing facilities for their ideas, with the government becoming their initial customer during the piloting level. The government would also secure the approval required and run the ideas in real-time for a large number of customers.
Speaking about the ideas, the state IT minister D. Sridhar Babu said many AI ideas fail due to a lack of proper testing, and TAIH would fill this gap by offering state-of-the-art facilities and a real-time and scalable testing ground. TAIH is looking forward to working with the companies, academia, investors and start-ups.
Revanth Reddy also proposed a “follow-up meet” of WEF at Hyderabad every July. Addressing the media, the Chief Minister said one year would be too long in the modern business cycles, and it was important to have a follow-up meeting in the middle of the year to assess the impact of the decisions made at Davos.
According to a media release from the government, the proposal has received unanimous approval, and WEF managing director Jeremy Jurgens announced that they had received several proposals and they would consider the Hyderabad proposal with due attention. The WEF currently holds “Summer Davos” or “Annual Meeting of New Champions”, mostly focusing on futuristic technologies.
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu has been attending the Davos summit for over 15 years. Andhra Pradesh has made the Davos event an annual investment calendar for the state, said C.M. Saikanth Varma, CEO of Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board (APEDB). “We are trying to get investments in January at Davos and want to complete the grounding of the project by next Davos meet,” he explained. The state has ensured faster execution cycles for several projects, keeping the Davos calendar in mind.
Though this year’s meeting is more about geopolitical tensions and less about investment agreements, both states have announced some moderate investment gains.
For Telangana, L’Oréal’s Rs 3,500 crore beauty-tech and AI innovation hub in Hyderabad, aimed at creating around 2,000 jobs. The state also signed MoUs, including Rashmi Group’s Rs 12,500 crore steel plant investment and a Rs 1,000 crore aerospace/MRO project with Sargad, a US-based company. Additionally, there were expressions of interest such as a ≈€600 million clean-energy project with NUkler Products and an AI hardware pact with Blaize, signalling diverse sector interest.
Andhra Pradesh has got a mix of reaffirmations and new strategic commitments. The state advanced a $12 billion clean-infrastructure partnership with Brookfield Asset Management, focusing on a gigawatt-scale, clean-energy-powered data-centre campus in Visakhapatnam, renewable energy, storage and green hydrogen projects. It also signed a pact with RMZ Group for up to $10 billion over the next five to six years to develop global capability centres, hyperscale data centres and industrial and logistics parks. In addition, the UAE agreed to establish a food processing cluster in the state and facilitate investment by about 40 UAE companies in logistics and related sectors.