Bharti Airtel on Friday announced that Google will invest up to $1 billion in the telecom major as part of its Google for India Digitization Fund. The deal includes Google investing $700 million to acquire 1.28 percent ownership in Airtel and up to $300 million towards potential multi-year commercial agreements.





The partnership, the telecom operator said, 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. It will also help accelerate the cloud ecosystem for businesses across India.



Google will make an equity investment of $700 million in Bharti Airtel at a price per share of Rs 734. The stock rose 1.95 percent to hit a high of Rs 721 in the initial trade