February’s India AI Impact Summit gathered leaders from around the world to discuss AI’s advancement as well as safety.  It also put India on the map as an AI center.  

AI development can benefit both the US and its  partners, particularly when linked to markets and strategic objectives where goals and capacities are complementary. This makes India uniquely interesting.

To be a global leader India needs computing infrastructure. With 40,000 GPUs today, it wants 100,000 by year’s end. US companies are supporting this.

In February the Adani Group announced a planned investment of $100 billion in data infrastructure, which will enable the development of Indian large language models. That builds on partnerships with Google and Microsoft where Google has announced a $15B investment in Indian data centers and Microsoft has announced a $17.5B investment in cloud and AI infrastructure.

Amazon just announced an additional $30 billion investment in India by 2030, designed to expand and support the country’s AI and cloud infrastructure. That builds on a $35 billion investment announced in December. Between 2010 and 2030 Amazon will have invested a total of $88 billion.

The Bay Area’s leading AI companies are also on the ground. 

Anthropic is partnering with Infosys to deliver AI services to businesses in complex and regulated industries such as telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing and software development. Its Claude models will be integrated into Infosys’ AI offerings through agents tailored to specific companies and sectors. India is already Claude’s second largest global market, building on mathematical and computer-based applications such as apps and software. Tata Group’s Air India is using Claude today, and Claude models are being trained in ten Indian languages.

For its part, OpenAI is partnering with Tata Consulting Services (TCS), with San Franciso-based investor TPG investing $1B in support. With offices in Bangalore, OpenAI has 100 million users in India, making India its second largest global market.

India’s strategy – and opportunity – is deployment at scale, building on data generated by hundreds of millions of digital consumers. More than frontier models, India is focusing on application-led innovation. The secret sauce is digital infrastructure. Developed over the last decade, a digital public identity (AADHAR) has been created for India’s 1.4 billion citizens. The Universal Payments Interface (UPI), enables digital payments nationally.  550 million people have smartphones and 800 million have broadband connections. 

As the next step in its digital buildout the government is looking to democratize AI inside India. The AI Impact Summit – with its focus on the democratic diffusion of AI, inclusive national development, institutional capacity building, and computing infrastructure – put a spotlight on India’s aspiration to be a bridge to other emerging economies. India has a demonstrated ability to develop innovative, cost-effective products and services that suit not only its own population but businesses and consumers in emerging markets where cost is key. This is an opportunity as US AI companies scale globally.

Startups are another key. The government is encouraging startups to develop applications that are relevant for India’s social and economic development in areas such as education, healthcare, agriculture and government. This year India’s first AI unicorn Fractal Analytics had its IPO, and the Blackstone Group has announced a $600 million investment in AI cloud startup Neysa. India’s abundance of tech talent and its readiness to throw itself into AI suggests a wide field for growth. Few other countries can match its scale. 

India’s preference for soft-touch, risk-based AI governance aligns well with California’s. As a member of the US-sponsored global semiconductor framework Pax Silica, it’s also positioned to integrate with semiconductor and electronics value chains. Bay Area technology companies have signaled that they understand India’s potential as a partner. As supply chains diversify through linkages between trusted partners, the opportunity for deeper US-India collaboration India is clear.

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