Google Cloud names Amit Kumar interim India head

GURGAON: A new hand on the tiller, a market in full sprint and an AI race that shows no sign of slowing. Google Cloud has appointed Amit Kumar as interim head of its India business, succeeding Sashikumar Sreedharan, as cloud adoption and enterprise AI deployment accelerate in one of the company’s key markets.

Sreedharan is leaving Google Cloud to pursue other opportunities. He took over as managing director of Google Cloud India in Jul 2025, after spending two years as chief operating officer for the Asia-Pacific region.

Kumar has been with Google Cloud since Mar 2021. He joined the company as sales director and, according to his professional profile, has been managing director, Digital Natives, Google Cloud India, since Nov 2025. In that role he has focused on Google Cloud and generative AI adoption among startups and digital-native companies in India. With more than five years at Google Cloud, his current mandate is centred on India’s startup and digital-native ecosystem.

His career before that is a tour of enterprise technology. Kumar spent two and a half years at Apple as country sales manager for enterprise and education in India, from Nov 2018 to Mar 2021. Before Apple, he was with IBM as director, software, India and South Asia, from Oct 2017 to Oct 2018, where his remit included the company’s integrated cloud and software business across enterprise, startup and other customer segments. He also spent more than 13 years at Microsoft, where he held multiple roles, and had a stint at Tata Telecom.

Karan Bajwa, president, Asia Pacific, Google Cloud, said in a LinkedIn post that the company’s momentum in India was being driven by accelerating business and AI growth. He said Kumar’s appointment would keep the company’s focus on customers and partners in the country.

The timing is telling. The change comes as Google Cloud competes with Microsoft and Amazon in India’s expanding cloud market, while AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic scale their own enterprise presence. Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian said in Apr that the company was stepping up investments in India across infrastructure, engineering talent and enterprise partnerships. Google Cloud operates two cloud regions in India, Mumbai and Delhi-NCR, and says its India cloud business has recorded significant growth over the past 12 months, helped by greater adoption of its AI models and integrated AI platform.

The money behind the push is serious. In Oct 2025, Google announced plans to invest $15 billion over five years to build a large-scale AI hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, its largest investment outside the US. The project will combine AI infrastructure, data centres, renewable energy capacity and a new subsea gateway. It is planned as the country’s first gigawatt-scale data centre campus, and Google broke ground on it in Apr 2026. Google Cloud has also expanded its Forward-Deployed Engineer organisation in India, placing dedicated AI specialists within customer environments to help businesses move AI applications from pilot programmes into production.

Against that backdrop, the choice is sensible. Kumar has sold to startups, enterprises and education customers, and has run the digital-native business that sits closest to the fastest-growing AI users. Placing a leader with that mix at the helm of the India operation as Google keeps widening its cloud and AI footprint looks like a safe pair of hands for a market that is anything but quiet.