The AI Race Recalibrates: Why India Is Now the Centre of Gravity

India’s digital scale has always been its strength, but over the last year, it has surged to become the new strategic frontier for the global AI race. We are witnessing a decisive moment where economics, infrastructure and policy are aligning at a pace few expected.

Google has announced a $15 billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam, AWS has committed $12.7 billion toward cloud and AI-ready data centres in India and Microsoft announced a $3 billion investment toward cloud and AI skilling.

On domestic front, Reliance, AdaniConneX, and other Indian conglomerates have outlined multi billion dollar plans for hyperscale data centres, signaling a clear intent to build compute capacity at home rather than depend entirely on global clouds.

This shift is not accidental.

India’s growing emphasis on data localization and digital sovereignty has made the country one of the most strategically important markets for companies building AI models, cloud capacity and consumer interfaces. In such an environment, understanding India’s regulatory and consumer landscape becomes as critical as technical capability.

At the same time, the world’s leading AI platforms ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude are aggressively expanding access in India, much of it free. The immediate goal is adoption. The larger goal is relevance.

Whoever understands India’s linguistic, behavioural and cultural diversity best will gain an advantage that scales far beyond this market.

India is no longer just a consumer of global AI. It is becoming a compute hub, a test bed and a competitive proving ground for the next wave of AI leadership.

As the race accelerates, one question stands out:

Will India’s AI edge be built on infrastructure alone or on the intelligent application of that infrastructure across industries?