Know who actually controls India’s Artificial Intelligence, not India
Know who actually controls India’s Artificial Intelligence, not India
Publish Date: 2026-02-15 03:43:00
Source Domain: www.wionews.com
India’s artificial intelligence ambitions rest on a foundation the government doesn’t own, built with hardware it can’t manufacture, controlled by private companies operating foreign technology. As the AI Impact Summit convenes at Bharat Mandapam this week, this uncomfortable reality goes beneath the celebratory announcements: Who actually controls the infrastructure powering India’s AI future? The answer is corporate, concentrated, and dependent.
The sovereignty illusion
The Ministry of Electronics and IT announced in May 2025 that India’s “national compute capacity has crossed 34,000 GPUs”- 34,333 units to be precise, more than triple the IndiaAI Mission’s original 10,000- GPU target.
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Impressive on paper. Problematic in practice: Every single GPU in that pool is foreign silicon. NVIDIA H100 and L40S accelerators. AMD chips. Google TPUs. All imported. All subject to foreign export controls and geopolitical calculations that could shift overnight. And over half- more than 50%- of this “national” capacity is controlled by a single private company: Yotta Data Services. Yotta has committed 9,216 advanced GPUs to the IndiaAI Mission through its Shakti Cloud platform. The company explicitly states it will provide “more than 50%” of the Mission’s GPU capacity, delivered in phases under commercial contracts the public cannot read.
Empanelled, not owned
The government calls these “empanelled GPUs”- a term that obscures ownership. These aren’t state assets. They’re private sector capacity approved for IndiaAI workloads under commercial arrangements. The IndiaAI compute portal functions as a marketplace. Researchers and startups access these GPUs through the platform, but the hardware belongs to cloud providers who bill for usage.
This model allowed rapid scaling without the government building data centers itself. But it also means India’s AI capability depends entirely on commercial relationships with firms whose…
