Gautam Adani, Sunil Mittal double down on need for domestic investment amid Middle East crisis: Data Centres, Renewables in focus

Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani and Airtel Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal both emphasised that the disruptions reshaping the global order had created a strategic opening for India.

A world remade

Adani opened with a broad indictment of the assumptions that had governed global economic thinking for nearly three decades. Supply chains built around efficiency, he argued, are giving way to those built around national interest. Semiconductors have become instruments of statecraft. Data is being treated as a national resource, Adani said. 

The Middle East conflict had only sharpened the argument. “What has become even more obvious from the recent Middle East conflict and targeted attacks on infrastructure is that energy security and digital security are no longer independent dimensions. They are now the twin foundations of national power,” he said at the conference.

India’s moment

According to Adani, India crossed 500 gigawatts of installed power capacity in March 2026, with over half of that added in the last decade. The GDP story, he argued, had shifted from incremental to compounding. “It took India 67 years after Independence to become a 2-trillion-dollar economy. But it took just 12 more years to add the next 2 trillion,” he said at the conference.

He also pushed back against what he called an imported narrative on AI and employment. “There is one version of the AI story circulating across global boardrooms. It says AI will eliminate workers. It says technology will replace human judgment. It says efficiency means fewer people. I reject this story entirely. India must not import fear from the Western world,” he said.

On the country’s IT sector, Adani said that the old model was built on writing code for other people’s platforms, he said. “The AI age does not reward that model. It rewards those who own the data. Those who own the computer. Those who own the models. Those who build the platforms on which the world runs,” he added.

Adani Group’s bets

The Adani Group is building what it claims will be the world’s largest single-site clean energy project at Khavda, Gujarat, and a gigawatt-scale data centre campus in Visakhapatnam with Google as a partner. The group has committed $100 billion each to energy transition and data centres.

“India must not rent the infrastructure of its intelligence future. India must build it. India must power it. India must own it on its own soil,” he said.

Mittal: This is the moment to invest

Airtel Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal urged the Indian industry to step up domestic capital expenditure and reduce reliance on imports, echoing the Prime Minister’s message from the previous day as he stressed that India’s underlying growth momentum remains strong despite global headwinds.

“These are difficult times. We, as a country, have been moving at a fantastic speed, growing at 6-7% year over year. Generally, things are looking very, very good. But some situations develop which are beyond anybody’s control,” he said, according to ANI.

Mittal laid out three priorities for industry: moving away from what he called “this obsession with the import of gold,” lowering energy costs, and accelerating the shift to renewable energy. He also called on businesses to “vote with our feet within our country” by increasing investments at home.

On Airtel’s own commitments, Mittal said the company spent roughly Rs 31,000 crore in capex in FY2024-25, with an additional Rs 7,000 crore through its tower subsidiary. “2026, which we’ll announce in the next two or three days, the investment went up. And we know that in the current year, the investment will keep on going up,” he said, per ANI.

“This is not the moment to shy away. This is the moment to invest, double down in our own country, because the underlying growth is there,” he said.

Mittal described India as “a continent of consumers, a large, young population wanting more products and more services,” and urged industry to meet that demand domestically. “Give them more from India, make in India, from India, serving India,” he said, according to ANI.

He also called on younger entrepreneurs to engage with industry bodies, noting that “the government looks towards chambers, especially a chamber like CII, to work closely with them to guide their policy framework.” Industry, which employs millions, must play its part in advancing the Prime Minister’s vision and strengthening India’s economic resilience, he said.

As geopolitical fault lines redraw trade, technology and energy priorities, India Inc. is positioning the current turbulence less as a threat and more as a generational opportunity. And in that context, Adani and Mittal have the same message: build domestic.