India’s biggest conglomerates used the India AI Impact Summit as a launchpad for bold capital commitments on Thursday, even as global technology leaders framed India as the next great theatre of artificial intelligence growth. The message to the world was clear: India doesn’t just want to use AI. It wants to build it, scale it and price it for the world.
While Tata Group and Reliance Industries put hard numbers and partnerships on the table, global CEOs such as Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai and Dario Amodei pitched India as both a talent powerhouse and a large-scale deployment market in the unfolding AI race.
At a time when IT stocks are reeling from AI-led disruption —with Tata Consultancy Services slipping to a five-year low —Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran unveiled what he described as a roadmap for the Tata Group’s AI-led future. The group plans to build India’s first 100-megawatt AI infrastructure capacity in partnership with OpenAI, signalling a shift from merely consuming AI to helping create core digital infrastructure for it.
The announcement is significant not only for its scale but also for its timing: Indian IT services companies are grappling with fears that generative AI tools could cannibalise traditional outsourcing revenue streams.
If Tata signalled strategic realignment, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani signalled scale. He said the group and Reliance Jio would invest as much as ?10 lakh crore over seven years in AI-related infrastructure. “India cannot afford to rent intelligence,” Ambani said, invoking Jio’s 2016 telecom disruption. “We will reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as we did the cost of data.”
The announcement follows large AI pledges by other Indian industrial houses, including Adani Group’s $100 billion Ai investment pleage earlier this week.
Alongside the investment pledges, global AI leaders struck a more measured tone—emphasising opportunity, collaboration and India’s scale advantage. Altman, whose company’s models have sparked both excitement and anxiety across the tech industry, spoke about India as one of the fastest-growing markets for AI applications. He further noted that over 100 million Indians use ChatGPT weekly, with students making up a third of that base.
Altman issued a striking prediction, stating, ‘By the end of 2028, more of the world’s intellectual capacity could reside inside of data centers than outside of them.’ He warned that super-intelligence could soon outperform CEOs and scientists, necessitating a global governance mechanism similar to the IAEA. Altman advocated for the democratisation of AI to prevent ‘centralised ruin’ and ‘effective totalitarianism.
Pichai highlighted India’s digital public infrastructure and developer base, underlining how the “India stack” creates fertile ground for AI deployment at population scale. He reiterated plans of building an AI hub in Visakhapatnam, as part of the company’s massive $15 billion India investment. He said, “This hub will house gigawatt scale compute and a new international subsea cable gateway bringing jobs and cutting-edge AI to people and businesses across India.”
Meanwhile, Amodei positioned his firm’s India strategy as partnership-led rather than disruption-led. “We succeed when enterprises succeed,” Amodei told CNBC TV18, describing Anthropic as primarily enterprise-focused and keen to “partner with every household name in India”. His remarks come amid market jitters globally, where advanced AI models such as Claude have heightened fears of automation-led disruption across IT services firms.