Airtel and Google Partner To Accelerate India's Digital Ecosystem Google to invest up to $1 billion in a partnership with Airtel as part of its Google for India digitization fund

Bharti Airtel, one of India's premier communications solutions providers, and Google will partner on a long-term, multi-year agreement to accelerate the growth of India's digital ecosystem.

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.

"Airtel and Google share the vision to grow India's digital dividend through innovative products. With our future ready network, digital platforms, last mile distribution and payments ecosystem, we look forward to working closely with Google to increase the depth and breadth of India's digital ecosystem," said Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel.

As part of this partnership, Google intends to invest up to $1 billion, as part of its Google for India digitization fund, which includes 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. This deal will be subject to necessary regulatory approvals.

As a part of its first commercial agreement, Airtel and Google will work together to build on Airtel's extensive offerings that covers a range of Android-enabled devices to consumers via innovative affordability programs. Together, the companies will continue to explore further opportunities to bring down the barriers of owning a smartphone across a range of price points, in partnership with various device manufacturers.

Under the larger strategic goals of the partnership, both companies will also potentially co-create India-specific network domain use cases for 5G and other standards, with cutting-edge implementations.