Pichai, Altman among tech CEOs attending the world’s largest AI summit in India

Pushing India as a global tech hub

PM Modi has been pushing the idea of making India a favourable tech destination for global companies through a series of initiatives, including a strong focus on manufacturing and has successfully convinced companies such as Apple to make iPhones in the country. While smartphone and other product manufacturing have been underway for years, New Delhi now wants to reduce its dependence on imports and secure chips and GPUs for strategic sectors, in a bid to establish a domestic semiconductor industry and capture a larger share of the global electronics market from China.

If they want to bring AI to the masses, they must address India’s AI workloads and deepen alignment with the government’s push for AI-driven public infrastructure.(Image: Express Image)

For the Prime Minister, hosting an international AI summit in India sends a clear message to the world that the country is transitioning into a global tech hub, in line with how his government is positioning India as digitally savvy and ready to embrace the next wave of growth through technology. With the summit’s focus on artificial intelligence, New Delhi may seek to woo global tech companies to invest in India, as the country offers three key ingredients — users, infrastructure, and talent — a combination few other countries can match.

India has a massive, tech-savvy population, and the country is opening up to companies such as Google and OpenAI, which already see the South Asian powerhouse as a lucrative market. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, has its largest user base in India, as does Google, which already has a sizeable presence here. It is no surprise, then, that these AI companies are offering free access to AI tools to millions of Indians, giving them vast amounts of data to train their models on.

Focus on data centres

While India offers global tech companies a vast market for their AI products, New Delhi also wants to position the country as a hub for expanding data centres, which house racks of servers connected by dense cabling, cooling systems to prevent overheating, and generators to ensure uninterrupted power. These facilities are essential to meeting the tech industry’s ongoing demand for computing power to build more advanced, capable AI models. Experts say massive data centres are needed and must be built quickly to power the artificial intelligence boom.

Other than Pichai and Altman, Anthropic PBC CEO Dario Amodei, and Meta Platforms Inc’s Alexandr Wang and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon are also on the guest list, along with top AI researchers including Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch.(Image: Express Image)

At the summit, India will pitch itself as the right destination for expanding hyperscale infrastructure and embedding AI into national platforms. While India trails the United States and China in the race to develop a native foundational AI model and lacks a large homegrown AI infrastructure company, the country has already demonstrated its ability to scale technology and build digital infrastructure powered by data from more than a billion people through Aadhaar, its biometric identification system.

Large tech companies understand how important India is to their growth and market expansion, which is why they are doubling down on investments worth billions of dollars in the country. If they want to bring AI to the masses, they must address India’s AI workloads and deepen alignment with the government’s push for AI-driven public infrastructure. To do that, they need to build India’s cloud and AI infrastructure, which requires a large talent pool, to deploy them, a vast digital user base, and strong market opportunities – all of which India offers.

Big Tech wants to seize this opportunity, with India emerging as the only major country offering large local opportunities. This is fuelled by the rise of e-commerce and quick commerce — major drivers of data centre growth in recent years — along with abundant space for large-scale data centre developments and relatively low power costs. Analysts say India offers a rare mix that global cloud providers, AI players, and tech companies are seeking.