India represents one of the largest and most promising markets for AI globally, according to Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India. In an interview with Moneycontrol, Jain highlighted that with a population exceeding one billion, the country offers immense scale for AI adoption, but true mass penetration, especially in smaller towns and villages, will depend on making AI affordable, accessible in local languages, and voice-enabled.
“For any AI company, India is a large opportunity,” Jain stated. He stressed that real widespread use requires colloquial interactions, stating, “People should be able to interact in their own local language — probably through voice and not just text.”
Abu Dhabi-based G42, backed by Mubadala and chaired by UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is intensifying its India strategy through heavy investments in AI infrastructure. The company is building core capabilities spanning data centres, large-scale compute clusters, and local-language large language models (LLMs) to accelerate the ecosystem.
Flagship supercomputing cluster for sovereign AI push
A major highlight is G42’s partnership with the Government of India under the IndiaAI Mission, including deployment of an 8-exaflop AI supercomputing cluster — one of the largest in the country — powered by Cerebras CS-3 chips. This system, accessible to IITs, IISc, AI startups, enterprises, and research institutions, supports both training and inferencing, though Jain predicts it will primarily drive inferencing for cost-efficient, high-speed deployment of existing models at scale.
“This will help accelerate the ecosystem… They can run extremely fast and in a very cost-efficient way,” Jain explained.
G42 has also advanced its local LLM efforts with the Nanda Indic LLM, starting with a 3-billion-parameter Hindi-English model last year and scaling to an 8.7-billion-parameter version trained on trillions of tokens. Designed for enterprise clients, it ensures data sovereignty by allowing hosting on local devices, clouds, or servers.
Jain noted positive government steps, including chip manufacturing initiatives and data centre tax incentives, which encourage foreign players to establish local infrastructure.
Building locally relevant use cases for AI
Looking ahead, Jain envisions India developing strong, accurate, locally relevant AI applications in native languages, innovations that could scale globally. “My guess is that India will build strong, locally relevant use cases… Those use cases and applications can become significant markets, even globally,” he said.
Jain also reflected on his transition from consumer tech (notably as former India head of Xiaomi) to AI infrastructure, a shift as “very different — not good or bad — just very different,” but exciting due to working at the cutting edge with enterprises and governments.
Globally, G42 operates major supercomputing clusters and is developing a 5-gigawatt AI campus in Abu Dhabi. In India, the focus remains on foundational infrastructure to enable affordable, sovereign AI that empowers startups, researchers, and businesses while driving national competitiveness.