A jet touches down. A naval base steps aside. And a sleepy stretch of Andhra's coast just got rebranded as India's next tech corridor.
Today, PM Narendra Modi inaugurated the Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport at Bhogapuram — a ₹5,640 crore greenfield project that's about to change how North Coastal Andhra flies, works and grows.
For decades, Visakhapatnam had a problem hiding in plain sight.
Its airport wasn't really its airport.
It ran out of a naval enclave — meaning every civilian flight operated on borrowed slots, at the Navy's mercy.
Commercial operations shift to Bhogapuram on August 17.
From that day, the naval base stops handling scheduled flights.
Vizag finally gets to fly on its own terms.
It's Andhra's first greenfield airport since the state split in 2014.
The last one before that? Hyderabad's Rajiv Gandhi International — back in 2008.
That's how rare a moment this is.
Here's the twist that makes this more than an airport story.
GMR says Microsoft, Google and Reliance are among the names eyeing data centres nearby.
An international airport plus fibre-friendly land plus coastal power access = exactly the recipe hyperscalers hunt for.
👉 Bhogapuram isn't just chasing tourists anymore. It's chasing servers.
The terminal itself even nods to the coast — shaped like the Parava, a flying fish native to these waters, wrapped in DigiYatra, AI passenger tech and a predictive ops centre to keep flights moving.
A naval enclave built walls around Vizag's growth for years.
One new runway just tore them down.
North Coastal Andhra doesn't just get an airport today — it gets a front door.
That's all for now!
